


I Don't Want a Lot for Solstice

by aerialiste



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Christmas, Christmas Crack, Christmas Fluff, Christmas Party, Christmas Smut, Christmas Tree, Coming Out, Cultural Differences, Domestic Castiel, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Fluff and Crack, Fluff and Smut, Gløgg, House Party, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Neo-Paganism, Pagan Festivals, Pie, Porn with Feelings, Sam at Stanford, Shameless Smut, Winter Solstice, Witch Castiel, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-03-03 00:17:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2831222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerialiste/pseuds/aerialiste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The tree catching on fire, Dean would maintain to the end of his days, had clearly been started by the squirrels. Or outlet overload, or outdated breaker boxes; possibly a frayed extension cord, or maybe a malfunctioning string of fairy lights. Not to mention Kevin Tran.</p><p>It most definitely had <em>not</em> been caused by him and Cas.</p><p>In which Dean drives out to Palo Alto to stay with Sam over winter break, and meets Sam's new co-op housemates, including comparative literature PhD candidate, fundamentalist cult survivor, and practicing witch Castiel Milton—which would all be confusing enough, if Cas weren't also unfairly gorgeous, especially in cowboy boots.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It had been the most epic holiday party in the history of—well, pretty much ever.

You’ve heard of Gatsby? Trimalchio? Andrew Jackson and his Big Block of Cheese?

None of those dudes had hosted parties that could have even been profitably _compared_ to this one.

It was Woodstock. It was Versailles. It was the Penthouse 1979 _Caligula_ , only with maybe slightly more depravity and better-looking leads.

Stanford students lucky enough to have been present that night would speak of it decades later, long after their graduations, with fondness, pride, and some degree of reverence.

It was one of those house parties that starts out normally enough, with a dozen or fifteen or twenty people—and then thirty, then fifty, then eighty, ninety, until suddenly every room is packed shoulder to shoulder, and if you live there, you don’t know who the guests are or who invited them, if anyone even did; and when you go upstairs to check on your bedroom, nervously, worried about fishtanks and orchids and terrified kittens hiding in coat closets, you find more people, and yet _more_ people, people you’ve never seen in your life, rows of people lining either side of the staircase yelling over the music and couples making out in the pantry and groups of earnest strangers cross-legged on your bed having deep conversations about post-Marxism and privilege, and, most improbably, a half-dozen strung-out skinny kids on the roof pinning _bedsheets_ to each other and discussing very seriously the possibility of human flight. (Come on—those _dreams_ , man. Everyone has them, it can’t just be an accident that we _all know_ what it feels like to fly!)

Inevitably, the cops come, and as the party panics and scatters, you find more people, in odder places: someone passed out in the mud room at the back of the house, and a couple comfortably resting in the backyard under the broken trampoline, and that one guy no one had ever seen before, propped up half-sitting in the basement’s unused shower stall—who was, mysteriously, clutching both a hairbrush and a tube of toothpaste, neither of which were his.

What acts of hygiene had he intended to perform? Would he have brushed his teeth with the hairbrush, or spread toothpaste on his hair?

Fair reader, it is not ours to know.

What we do know is that by the time the party ended, around 4:00 a.m., the kitchen tile was a red sticky mess with spilt sangria and the black scuffed imprints of shoes. Some chem majors had stolen a tub of dry ice from the lab, which still sat fuming tiredly in one corner of the dining room, from which all the furniture had been removed to make a dance floor. A drunk girl in a kilt and fishnets persistently DJ’d all her favorite radio pop now that there wasn’t anyone to complain or stop dancing, lipsynching to herself and getting tangled up in the headphones.

Earlier, the music had been…eclectic. And extremely loud. Accordingly, the arrival of the police surprised no one, and they’d been polite and left peaceably enough—after issuing an appropriate noise warning due to neighbor complaints, but unfortunately not before a great many people had hastily disposed of ziploc baggies in whatever way seemed best to them at the time.

The house’s actual inhabitants now sat dazed on the front porch, gathered on and around a fairly disgusting ancient gray tweed sofa that someone had found that summer on garbage night.

In awed silence they surveyed the yard, with its many bottles and cans liberally distributed across the ornamental lava gravel. A flowered fitted sheet was caught in the top of the cedar tree, the undergrad wearing it having cascaded gently the rest of the way down through its prickly but cushioning branches. Strings of Christmas lights trailed through the empty flower beds, half-torn off the porch railings and flickering on and off like weird little bug zappers, purple and orange (because they’d actually started out the season as Halloween lights, two months ago).

“That,” said Kevin Tran, in a hushed voice, “was fucking epic.” He dropped his cigarette into a half-full beer bottle, stood up off the porch steps, and wandered inside, swaying slightly.

His housemate Sam Winchester, halfway through his first year of law school, took up most of the ratty sofa, stretched out along its length. He seemed asleep, his head in his girlfriend Jess’s lap as she ran one hand slowly through his hair.

Jess wore an oversized leather jacket, a sexy Mrs. Claus outfit, and foam reindeer antlers, one of which hung askew. Unfortunately she’d been the one who’d found the hairbrush/toothpaste guy in the basement, when she’d gone down to check on Sam’s kombucha and yogurt cultures, and there might have been some screaming. She seemed okay now, but quieter than usual. She studied Sam’s face for a moment, then removed her headband and thoughtfully placed it on his head, admiring the result.

Sam and Kevin’s other housemate, Charlie Bradbury, sat perched on the end of the sofa, feet up on its broad tweed arm like a roosting chicken, her face lit blue by the screen of her phone as she programmed or tweeted or tumblred or snapchatted or played Scrabble turns or, more likely than not, did all of these things at once.

She felt Jess’s eyes on her, looked up, and without comment took several unflattering photographs of Sam in the reindeer antlers, his mouth now slightly open.

And the last housemate, the oldest of the four? The supposedly responsible homeowner himself, Stanford PhD candidate in comparative literature, university teaching fellow, survivor of an infamous fundamentalist-Zionist cult/militia, and practicing witch Castiel Milton?

Cas stood out on the sidewalk in front of his house, looking up at the sky in disbelief as freakishly tiny snowflakes started to fall. He was wearing black pinstriped slacks, a dark blue dress shirt, a black silk necktie, and one black cowboy boot.

“What the actual fuck,” mumbled Sam’s brother Dean, into Cas’s hair.

“Right?” Cas marveled, leaning back in Dean’s arms so he could look upward. Dean tightened his grip to brace them both as they stared up into the streetlight, watching. The temperature was maybe in the upper forties so the snow turned mist as quickly as they could catch sight of it. Minute winking motes swirled down in eddying circles, looked more like glitter than snowflakes.

“I can’t fucking get away from this shit,” Dean said in disbelief, not really that upset because Cas’s soft brown hair was all up in his mouth and nose, and when he inhaled as discreetly as he could, it smelled like pears and turmeric and honestly a little bit like hash; but mostly like Cas, a smell he was starting to get really used to.

Cas tilted his head back farther, leaning against Dean’s shoulder to stare up at him. “Your eyelashes are wet,” he murmured, which of course meant they had to start kissing again, which was fine.

On the curb, in an enormous smoldering heap, the remnants of the burnt Christmas— _solstice_ —tree sizzled slightly. Dean still felt a little badly about that, although not so badly that he couldn’t concentrate on the warmth of Cas’s mouth, or how natural it seemed to wind that black silk around his fist and pull him in more closely, deepening the kiss until he felt rather than heard Cas’s breath catch in his chest.

The tree catching on fire, Dean would maintain to the end of his days, had clearly been started by the squirrels. Or outlet overload, or outdated breaker boxes with worn connectors (he’d been putting himself through KU doing construction and electrical work); possibly a frayed extension cord, or maybe a malfunctioning string of fairy lights. Not to mention Kevin Tran.

It most definitely had _not_ been caused by him and Cas.

•

Dean had arrived in Palo Alto just three days before, having driven through the night. He’d been hurrying to get out of Lawrence ahead of a nasty-looking cold front, and just as eager to leave finals and the university behind him. He only had a semester left in his kinesiology program, and that fall had been the last big push to finish course requirements and most of his thesis. In the spring all he had was an internship, with a few fitness instruction classes and his work-study job, assisting researchers in the cardiovascular health lab.

And spring semesters were always better: summer lay ahead like a promise, and the days lengthened, and students started coming out of their layers instead of putting them on. Every year Dean felt like a rodent emerging from its hole when Daylight Savings Time kicked in and the sun finally returned.

Thus: his annual trek to spend the winter break with his kid brother, where palm trees and girls on beach cruisers were still a part of the campus landscape even in December.

Starting law school, though, had meant that Sam decided he was entitled to leave residence hall life behind and live off-campus in a house with diverse unwashed others of his freaky-ass hippie kind.

“The guy who owns this place, he’s really…he’s _something else_ , Dean,” Sam had told him over the phone one Saturday, justifying his choice to move into the co-op, which was part of a neighborhood called, quite ominously as far as Dean was concerned, “the Dead Houses.”

“Dude, I can’t tell if _something else_ is bad or good,” Dean had grunted, rinsing out his coffee cup in his own studio apartment’s kitchen sink. “Do you mean, _something else_ like, curates a dried fruit collection and likes to watch you sleep, or—?”

Sam laughed, while Dean nearly dropped the phone trying to shoulder into his jacket, not wanting to be late for a weekend-long construction project. Sam didn’t need to know that almost all the money from Dean’s second job got laundered through Uncle Bobby and Aunt Ellen, and turned up in Sam’s checking account in the form of an annual textbook scholarship. (Bobby hadn’t even fought Dean on it. He understood.)

There were various other things that Sam also didn’t need to know, in Dean’s opinion, such as some of the worse stuff that had gone down toward the end of their father’s life and immediately afterward; or the recent flatlining of Dean’s longterm on-again-off-again relationship with Lisa Braeden.

A few weeks ago, Lisa had switched it off in a pretty permanent way, mostly due to the fact that she’d come back to the cardiovascular lab one night after closing hours to retrieve some files and found Dean engaged in certain unauthorized…equipment testing, with an agile sophomore named Aaron.

But Sam could be weirdly sensitive when he wanted to (and a relentless blowhard when he didn’t), and hadn’t asked about Lisa. Which made it easier not to have to explain why, for the fourth year in a row, Dean wouldn’t be joining her and her family for the holiday.

Besides, Sam probably already had a hunch about Dean’s preferences. He’d never really been able to stay on the DL as much as he would have preferred, especially in the Midwest, and Sam had a brain, and eyes; and in fact now his kid brother was suddenly talking this Castiel Milton guy up like he’d started picking out tablecloth and napkin colors for his and Dean’s wedding reception. Dean narrowed his eyes, but kept listening.

“So get this,” Sam was saying, as Dean slid into the Impala and started her idling, blowing on his hands, distracted by the faint click that had lately crept into the usual engine sounds. “He’s from this totally insane family—they’re famous, this seriously out-there right-wing religious cult called the Garrison. That’s why he has such a weird name—he has like eight brothers and they’re all named after angels. It’s some kind of fundamentalist rural compound out in Montana where the women have to wear _headcoverings_ and long skirts. And no one’s allowed to have any paintings or art or images of any kind, not even a t-shirt with a logo on it, or listen to music that has words, or watch television or go to the movies. Or even watch the _news_. It’s amazing he turned out as normal as he did.”

“Oh yeah?” Dean had responded automatically, steering the Impala out of the ice-slicked driveway. “What does _normal_ mean coming from a vegan? Or no, sorry, wait, you’re paleo this week, right? Or gluten-free? Or you only eat dead insects that you find on the ground, if they had happy lives and died a natural death?”

“You’re such an ass,” huffed Sam. “I’m telling you, Cas is awesome. He’s done this total one-eighty, and now he’s—well, he’s sure not Christian anymore. And he’s some kind of scary linguistics genius, who speaks about fifteen languages; and he plays guitar _and_ piano, and he’s—I just think you’d get along, is all.”

“So how’d he get out from under all that?” Dean asked, curious despite himself.

“It’s a wild story—this one woman managed to escape from the compound, like literally in the middle of the night, and she thought Cas was the one kid she should bring with her, because—because he’s—well, he was the youngest.” Sam paused. “Also, he’s gay.”

Dean nodded, which of course Sam couldn’t see. “Yeah, I’m gonna guess the Branch Davidians weren’t too cool about that.”

“Understatement. Plus his being so into music, and books, and languages—it’s like everything Cas was _born_ to do, he wasn’t _allowed_ to do. The Garrison’s not just religious, they’re also basically a militia. They’re holed up in a bunch of cabins with all this stockpiled army surplus stuff, weapons and grenades and MREs and, and _toilet paper_. And gold and silver coins, because _obviously_ the Illuminati controls the Fed so paper currency, excuse me, _promissory notes_ , are valueless if not backed by an actual medieval _gold standard_.”

Sam made a strangled haughty sound which Dean correctly placed as incredulity mingled with contempt. He’d been hearing that sound, sometimes politely muffled behind one hand, since Sam was about five. It must be hard to be that intelligent; Dean could only imagine. If human beings and their idiotic choices baffled even him, lunkhead that he was, it must make Sam want to pull his own head off sometimes.

Sam continued, unaware that he’d basically just read his brother’s mind. “He’s so smart, it must have been the worst for him, Dean. Plus he’s a _marshmallow_ —he acts so cool, but he’s totally that guy who crosses four lanes of traffic to kneel down and talk to dogs, and babies in strollers. And he spent his entire childhood training for the end of the fucking world. Learning how to dress game, and break down and set up _assault_ _rifles_ while being _timed_.”

Dean tries to laugh and is once again really glad Sam doesn’t remember their dad that well.

“Dogs, I should have guessed. So when’s the engagement party? Have you told Jess you’re leaving her for a paramilitary dog-lover?”

Sam had spent years ignoring Dean and didn’t even respond, just kept going. “He’s been running the co-op for six years now. There’s two other housemates, both computer science majors, and the bedroom that’s open right now is the one with a separate entrance, which is, since you mention her, perfect for Jess coming over.”

Dean had wondered about that, but he knew better than to ask why Sam didn’t just move in with her. “But how’d this guy wind up owning a house? Not exactly cheap real estate in that area.”

“This woman, Naomi, she was some kind of relative, like an aunt by marriage or second cousin or I don’t know what—when she split from the Garrison, they made it out here, because she grew up in the South Bay. He’d been homeschooled his whole life, but wound up going to a regular high school for a couple years and did really well, which is how he got into Stanford. Around then is when Naomi died, which he still won’t talk about. She was a piano teacher, I think? Anyway the house was in her family, so she left it to Cas.”

Dean had already looked up pictures of the co-operative, which like all of the Dead Houses had its own webpage—a funky two-story cedar-shingled cottage called “Box of Rain,” a name he grudgingly approved, sited on a corner lot behind ragged eucalyptus trees.

(Privately he thought it would have looked nicer with grass instead of gravel, and without those pretentious bleached-out Tibetan prayer flags. He circled the house a few times using street view, estimating the number of original single-paned windows and calculating that the saved energy costs would pay for installing double-glazed within four or five months.)

But Sam was happy, the co-op’s rent was cheap, and even more importantly his housemates were cool about Dean coming out and crashing for a couple of weeks.

And if Dean had happened to google this Cas guy while looking up his street address, no harm no foul. It’s the Information Age, he’d told himself defensively, maybe also checking out his Twitter and Instagram accounts (@NonSumAngelus) to find some admittedly appealing selfies of Cas in running shorts. In the pictures, he always wore long-sleeved t-shirts or warmup jackets, but his legs were bare and tanned, finely articulated with those small defined muscles that distance runners get.

Long, straight legs; lean hips; angular quads. Anatomy. Physiology. Dean was doing research here. A nice fibularis longus. A well-developed extensor digitorum longus.

Runners usually had tight glutes, too. The problem with selfies, Dean thought restlessly, is that there wasn’t ever a rear view. Dean then refused to admit he had even had that thought. Hey, if Cas didn’t want this stuff to be seen, he shouldn’t put it out there.

But it was out there; and Cas was out, unlike Dean.

He wondered how hard that had been, for someone who’d grown up in Crazy Christian Land. Presumably a lot harder even than being drunk, paranoid John Winchester’s oldest kid from Lawrence, Kansas.

As the semester ground down and bad weather kicked in, when Dean opened up his browser to log in for another exam or to find a few new sources for his thesis, more often than not he’d click idly over to Cas’s Instagram, just to see if there were any new selfies. Who knows: maybe Sam would be in one. (Sam, of course, had his own social media accounts, a fact Dean chose to ignore for this purpose. Whatever this purpose actually _was_.)

In the running selfies, Cas looked serene, his face and eyes still and quiet, shirt soaked through with sweat but visibly at peace. By contrast, in group pictures, surrounded by housemates and friends, he’d be alight and grinning, holding up a drink or some food item usually unrecognizable to Dean, sometimes kissing someone’s cheek or being kissed—clearly still in his element, just a different element. _Steelworker by day, exotic dancer by night_ , he thought; and then rolled his eyes at himself, because Cas looked nothing like a construction worker. Or for that matter an exotic dancer.

In fact, Sam’s new landlord-slash-housemate dressed with unusual formality when he wasn’t exercising—not even just shirt and tie but often waistcoat and jacket, all in cool colors: different shades of navy blue, black, purple, pinstriped charcoal. Dean wondered if this was a holdover from Crazy Christian Land (he’d better remember not to call it that when he got there), the way Mormons dressed up; or if it were some kind of statement about masculinity or sexuality that he just couldn’t parse.

Why else would a humanities grad student consistently dress like a cross between a tax accountant and a Chicago gangster? Maybe Cas just knew that he looked incredible that way.

Dean had always been more of a jeans-and-flannel guy: Carhartts and Red Wing steel toes for work, sweats and Converse for the gym. But the way Cas carried himself—Dean kept going back to the pictures as if trying to figure something out.

He embodied all these contradictions, somehow; the guy had enormous eyes like a freaking cartoon princess, but also continual dark stubble, no matter what time of day the photo had been taken. He managed to be simultaneously slim _and_ ripped, which only came from winning the genetic lottery (Dean knew this from years of workouts, trying to achieve something similar and failing—he was always going to be built pretty much like a brick shithouse, which he’d come to accept, because at least he was strong). And those tightly-fitting shirts and slacks, the way they both covered up every inch of skin yet also drew attention to what was just underneath, the hipbones and biceps and shoulder muscles and—

After a few minutes of such niggling yet unanswerable questions, Dean would x out of Instagram and direct himself doggedly back to lib.ku.edu. There were about a hundred reasons why it didn’t matter, and at least ninety of them involved Sam; plus no way a guy like Cas didn’t have a boyfriend, or a whole dance floor full of boyfriends; plus—

It had just been a long semester. Aaron’s parents had transferred him back east to Brandeis, apparently to keep a better eye on him; and Lisa wasn’t even speaking to Dean, but had left all his shit outside his apartment in the middle of the night in a big cardboard box, even including all those little passive-aggressive objects it would have made way more sense to throw out, like Q-tips and pocket change and ticket stubs and (pointedly) an out-of-date box of condoms. She’d also left the bottom of the box untaped, so that when Dean picked it up, everything fell out and rolled off his narrow balcony.

(Dean was glad that his colorful language so entertained the toothless old guy who lived downstairs and sat next to his door all day in a lawn chair, drinking clear liquid out of a mason jar. Someone should get a laugh out of his massively fucking up with Lisa. Lisa herself probably wasn’t laughing, whatever else she was doing. Dean was the literal worst.)

A really _long_ semester. Good time to see Sam, kick back, sit out in the sun, drink a few beers, not think about much of anything. Not about runner’s legs, or their hipbones.

Or stubble. Definitely no point thinking about stubble.

When he packed the car to start driving, he hesitated for a long time, and then put his old Yamaha acoustic in the trunk. Maybe Cas liked to play music with other people. Maybe they’d get stoned and play a couple of Christmas songs, who knew.

•

By the time Dean pulled up outside Box of Rain at dusk, it was about thirty-six hours after he’d locked his apartment door in Lawrence. Despite or perhaps because of all the Mountain Dew he felt lightheaded, which didn’t make it any less unsettling when Sam rush-tackled him and actually lifted his feet off the ground in an enthusiastic hug that somehow turned into a big swooping circle, Sam laughing his stupid annoying face off.

“Goddammit, Sammy, put me down,” Dean managed to grunt, despite the fact that his ribs were being crushed. “Let’s not, you know, remake the Folger’s incest commercial here.”

Sam’s entire face lit up as he dropped Dean back on his feet again (Dean was just going to pretend that hadn’t happened) and then, even worse, booped him on the nose. “ _You’re_ my present this year.”

Dean ducked and slapped away his hand in irritation, not least because behind Sam he could see people on the porch, and that tall guy leaning elegantly against one of the pillars, wearing all black, had to be—

“Hello, Dean.”

Cas’s voice was unexpectedly deep. He kept his arms folded but jerked his head slightly in greeting, like they’d already met, his eyes level and calm like in the running selfies.

Behind him on the porch swing, a redheaded woman in a green t-shirt that said KEEP CALM AND CARRY A WAND and a smaller black-haired guy watched something on the same laptop screen, eyes moving together, almost in each other’s laps, and didn’t seem to have noticed Dean’s embarrassment at being picked up and swung around like a chick.

Dean had just cleared his (suddenly dry) throat to respond when Sam clapped him on the shoulder. “Cas, this is my brother. And my _god_ does he need a shower.” He swiped the Impala’s keys from Dean’s nerveless fingers and popped the trunk, rooting around for his duffle bag.

Dean took a deep breath, squared his shoulders and went up a couple of porch steps, enough to stick his hand out at Cas. Cas looked at it for a half-second, head on one side like he’d never shaken anyone’s hand before, and then reached out for Dean’s, slowly.

The skin of his palm was warm and dry and it did things to Dean that he didn’t know a handshake could do. One of Cas’s fingers actually slid up to _brush the inside of Dean’s wrist_ as their eyes met, and Dean saw for the first time what grainy Instagram hadn’t revealed—that Cas’s eyes weren’t only stupidly huge but also a startling dark blue, and he just had a bare second to think frantically, _No, nope, nuh-uh, not this guy, not now, not like this_ —before Sam was behind him, jostling them apart and shoving his guitar case into his hands.

“Dean plays, too,” Sam said, cheerfully oblivious. “ _And_ he writes songs. So tonight we’re getting hammered and singing _carols_. And _hymns._ Lots of _Christmas_ songs. About _Jesus_ , and the _Bible,_ and herald _angels._ ”

He grinned at Cas like he’d said something extremely funny; Cas managed to look both put-upon and infinitely patient as he refolded his arms across his chest and sighed inaudibly.

“ _Shut up_ ,” said the pair on the porch swing, in creepy unison.

“I’m warning you, Sam, if you keep on with this Christmas shit you’re gonna wake up dead some morning,” continued the girl, not looking up. “Cas can totally kill you in your sleep. Or I’ll curse you, or Kevin’ll sic some wrathful-ass Vajrayana deity on you.”

“I can do that,” said the guy next to her, nodding. “All the major wrathful deities take PayPal.”

Sam failed to look terrified. “Dean, this is Charlie—” (the redhaired woman looked up, face suddenly beaming, and threw Dean a peace sign; he liked her immediately) “—and Kevin. My other housemates, who are as you can see walking stereotypes of nerdiness. When they walk, that is. They’re mostly sedentary, just plugged into the Matrix.”

As if to disprove this, Kevin unfolded his legs and came over to shake Dean’s hand, flipping unkempt black hair out of his eyes; it might even be longer than Sam’s.

“Dude, I’m so sorry about your brother,” he said dryly, and despite his weariness and being generally excessively physically hyper-aware of the guy still standing silently behind him, Dean laughed.

“Yeah, me too. But he grows on you. Or maybe he just grows.”

Dean definitely didn’t feel the back of his neck tingling, like Cas was radiating some weird electrical charge. He was just tired. That was it.

Either way he didn’t expect Cas to move so fast. One minute still leaning against the porch, the next he had both Dean’s bags inside the screen door, holding it open with one foot. A foot wearing a black cowboy boot. Dean stared at it helplessly.

“I hope you eat asparagus, I made paella, Sam’s room has a rollout and so does mine but his has the better mattress,” Cas rasped out, all in a rush, his face suddenly uncertain, almost vulnerable. “We also made pecan pie, Sam said you like pie.”

“ _We_ made pie, oh please. Cas made the filling, but _I_ made the crust,” added Charlie, slipping inside ahead of Dean, “because pastry is the most important part and it should only be prepared by delicate lady hands. And because these vegan morons don’t understand you need two full sticks of shortening per piecrust.”

She turned back to Dean, cupped her hands around her face and mouthed _butter,_ smirking at him before she took off down the hallway. Dean smiled back, feeling completely at home.

Sam shoved him. “Get inside, you’re blocking the door. And there’s _gløgg_.” He pronounced the word with difficulty, like it had an R somewhere in it, only stuck in the back of his throat. Dean turned and looked at him through raised eyebrows.

“Fuck, I don’t know, okay? Cas speaks Danish—just, come on. It’s alcohol, you’ll love it.”

Somehow in an awkward clump all three men squeezed through the door at once, Kevin holding the laptop above his head and yelling at Charlie about compiling a python into an executable.

Cas’s arm brushed firmly against Dean’s back as he let the screen door fall shut behind them. Dean didn’t dare even look at him.

Whatever Cas’s weird background, the dude was so far out of his league it wasn’t even a thing. It wasn’t a thing! It would never be a thing, because it couldn’t be a thing. Nothing here, nothing to see. These are not the cowboy boots you’re looking for, please move along.

Cas dropped Dean’s bags at the foot of the staircase on his way back to the kitchen, and Dean finally got to see the rear view which hadn’t been in any of the selfies.

Which, had anyone known what that did to him, would have explained with perfect clarity why he proceeded, along with Sam and his new housemates, to get appropriately drunk.

•

Box of Rain’s kitchen turned out to have a cast-iron wood-burning stove, which, along with a pile of dark red pillows and a wide brown leather couch (“It came with Sister Naomi’s house,” Cas explained apologetically, as though Dean’s jacket weren’t also made out of dead cow), offered the perfect place for dessert, after Cas’s genuinely spectacular saffron paella.

According to the roster on the fridge, it was Kevin’s turn to do the dishes, which he categorically refused to do (“it’s nearly Festivus, people, don’t make me start my annual Airing of Grievances”), so they piled everything in the sink and all wound up more or less standing around the stove eating pie in absorbed silence.

Which pie, Dean had to admit, especially since he’d opted for a second piece, was nothing less than stellar, with, as promised, a buttery crust and browned, sugary pecan halves. “A full cup of maple syrup,” Cas offered, pleased when Dean looked at him in disbelief.

Sam made sure that everyone saw him whip the cream by manly hand, with an outsized wire whisk that would have looked like a garden tool in anyone else’s grip. And Dean might have given him more grief about this gross display of ruggedness, except he was too invested in stealing covert blobs of cream from the bowl whenever Sam’s back was turned.

Best of all, gløgg, or anyway this kind of gløgg, wasn’t just mulled wine; Cas kept splashing generous amounts of brandy into the giant spackleware pot simmering on the woodstove, scenting the entire house with cinnamon sticks and floating orange rinds.

Also, while standing over it stirring, Cas’s cheekbones had developed an attractive red flush, which Dean by no means noticed.

Dean further failed to notice the way Cas talked to himself under his breath in languages other than English, ran his hands through his rumpled dark hair, and at one point caught Dean’s eye just as he’d swiped another index finger through the whipped cream.

He froze, guilty finger in mouth, as Cas winked, slowly enough so that Dean could tell he didn’t just have something stuck in one eye, and then he turned back to his concoction.

Dean was fucked.

Charlie wandered over to the stove, teasing Cas about secret herbs and spices, unfazed by his raised eyebrow. “What?” she said, bumping his hip with hers, peering into the bubbling liquid. “Why even _be_ a witch if you can’t gussy up your booze with more than, what are those, cloves? From _Safeway_ , Cas. They’re in a _can_.”

“Ms. Bradbury, what do we not talk about in public,” Cas said automatically, as if they had this exchange frequently.

But, Dean noticed, he returned the can of cloves to the cupboard and pulled out a couple of small glass jars instead, adding pinches to his gløgg, frowning.

Charlie rolled her eyes pointedly at Dean, who was still to be honest kind of stuck on the word _witch_ , trying to put it together with her t-shirt and a few of the more…unexpected ornaments on the Christmas tree in the living room.

Well, he’d assumed it was a Christmas tree. Christmas trees of course didn’t usually have silver crescent moons all over them, or little wooden discs with what looked like runes burned into them. To say nothing of a Mr. Spock Funko Pop tree-topper, its bright blue science-officer uniform having caught Dean’s eye en route to the kitchen.

Probably made sense not to stick an angel up there, he reasoned, given Castiel’s name, not to mention his entire life. Maybe being—what, a pagan? Wiccan? Ravenclaw?—had helped him recover from a childhood spent field-stripping handguns and waiting for the End Times.

Cas lifted the ladle to his lips, blowing on it, cheeks pink in the steam. Could men even be witches? Weren’t they warlocks? Dean felt he should probably know this. A wizard? A magician? Magicians just made him think of Will Arnett on _Arrested Development_ , knife between his teeth, falling out of a coffin to the blare of “The Final Countdown.”

“Fine, spend your life in the broom closet, see if I care,” Charlie harrumphed, flopping onto the couch with her plate of mostly whipped cream.

“Dean, can you start handing me those mugs?” Cas asked, pointing with one elbow to the countertop. Dean passed them to him one at a time, careful not to touch him accidentally.

The gløgg turned out to be unbelievably strong. Dean wasn’t going to complain, even though after a while it seemed he’d maybe had more than everyone else. Somehow Cas kept ladling it into his mug, while Dean looked anywhere but at him.

“Murgs of gløgg,” Kevin kept saying, snortlaughing at his garbled rhyme, until Sam, exasperated, pushed him into the pile of pillows, hitting him over the head with one until he subsided.

Dean had wandered over to the ceiling-high china hutch, drawn by what turned out to be Charlie’s impressive DVD collection, and wound up sitting on the floor with her arguing about Éowyn and Faramir’s deleted scenes.

“How is their _wedding_ even _important_ ,” Dean scoffed, trying not to know where Cas was (moving around the table, putting out placemats and silverware presumably for breakfast, his pale grey necktie not even loosened, still completely sartorially assembled, but having a baritone conversation with himself in an impossible low rumble).

 _Fuck him_ , Dean thought, and then immediately repressed that memory. Fortunately his mouth kept talking about _The Return of the King_ without additional input.

“Even if you don’t know the story, you can tell they got together—and the awesome thing about Éowyn is that she’s a shieldmaiden of the Rohirrim, and a serious battle asset, not her freaking _relationship status_. I mean for once can’t a female character just be—“

“—more than arm candy?" Charlie snapped? "I’ll tell you why it’s important: because Aragorn ditched her for _Liv Tyler_ , is why. What’s Arwen’s great tactical maneuver—whispering suggestively into a horse’s ear? Otherwise she has all the personality of an ironing board.” Over by the fireplace Sam and Kevin had started flicking whipped cream at each other with their forks.

She screwed up her face, trying to explain. “Look, when I was fifteen it just—it really mattered to me, that she not get _dumped_ , that’s all. She shouldn’t be punished for being a good soldier. Like if you’re a ‘strong female character’”—here she made sarcastic air quotes—“then you’re doomed to loneliness, just because suddenly all the men around you are afraid for their nuts? Éowyn should have hooked up with Galadriel, just to spite that asshole. Plus Galadriel is _way_ hotter.” She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively. “All shall love me and despair? Oh, I’ll love you, Cate. You just have to trim those fingernails first.”

Dean almost coughed up a mouthful of gløgg as Charlie kept going. “I mean, you’ve read the books, right? She and Faramir have all these scenes in the Houses of Healing, because it takes her a while to get over her whole King of Gondor hangup. But in the theater version Jackson basically reduces them to just one stupid little—”

“Oh my god,” Sam said from the floor, his head propped at an uncomfortable-looking angle against the sofa. “There’s whipped cream in my hair.”

He leveraged himself up, peering at Kevin. “Hang on, you’ve got some on your face—”

Snickering, he managed to smear an impressive amount across Kevin’s forehead. “That’s it, Winchester,” hissed Kevin, in hot pursuit as Sam bolted for the back door, leaving it hanging open. Charlie hopped up without finishing her sentence and sprinted out into the yard after them, leaving Dean to stand in the doorway, breathing in the cooler night air.

“The fire is probably overkill,” said Cas right behind him. Dean startled and spun around to find Cas barely a foot away, drying his hands on a dishtowel. “Do you want another drink?”

“Cas, if I drink any more I won’t know which side of the guitar to play,” he said, impressed at his own nonchalance. Which would have been even more convincing if his voice hadn’t cracked.

All at once a wave of sleepiness washed over him and before he quite knew how it happened Cas had parked him on the couch, hands still wrapped around his empty mug. Cas snapped off the overhead light and closed the stove’s damper before settling at the other end, legs stretched out in front of him. He ran his hands through his hair, rendering it completely deranged, then let his head flop against the back of the couch with a sigh.

“So Sam has no idea you’re gay, huh.”

Dean couldn’t quite believe what he’d heard. At all. He replayed it a few times to make sure. After about the fourth or fifth rewind, though, Cas had still said it, and also had the nerve to be looking right at him, his eyebrow raised again like a sexy question mark.

Dean had started to take that eyebrow very fucking personally.

“Wow, and here I thought foreplay was old-fashioned,” he finally managed, placing his mug on the floor with a clatter and shifting to glare more directly at Cas. “It’s not really a label I’m into, now that you mention it, so no, he fucking doesn’t, and while we’re making polite conversation, how long have you been a _witch_?”

To Dean’s surprise Cas grinned, the same delighted eye-crinkling grin he’d seen in the party photos. “Long enough to be able to tell when someone’s into me,” he said softly, in that stupidly low register that seemed to go directly through Dean’s stomach and curl up inside his pelvis. “Or when I’m really, _really_ into him.” They locked eyes and without being conscious of what he was doing, Dean slid his palm down the cool leather toward Cas—

—whose housemates, of course, chose that moment to come shrieking through the kitchen, all armed with what looked like Nerf swords. “Let me tell you my _thoughts_ on _yaoi_ , you little _programmer_ ,” panted Charlie, whacking Kevin over the head before he darted behind the kitchen island. They circled it warily a few times until Kevin lunged, parried and tripped her, making a break for the living room with Charlie scrambling after him.

Sam came in after them, not so much as looking over at Dean, instead seizing the bowl of whipped cream with his non-sword hand and charging out again.

Despite being moose-sized, Sam was also fast, Dean knew from bitter experience. From the front yard came muted cries, and Sam shouting something about Feats of Strength.

In the sudden heavy silence, the air in the kitchen hung motionless. Dean could hear the clock ticking, coals in the woodstove settling, and a hushed rustle as Cas loosened his tie maybe a half-inch, undoing the top button of his shirt.

“Why do I get the feeling for you that was basically the equivalent of throwing your panties at my head,” Dean said, lust pooling in his mouth, making him feel daring. “Does the necktie stay on when you shower? Is it magical too? Do you sleep in those boots?”

Without answering, and exactly as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Cas reached over and threaded his fingers through Dean’s, pulling his hand toward him so that the rest of Dean sort of had to follow.

This wasn’t happening, Dean informed himself, as Cas bent to rub his cheek against Dean’s knuckles, as unselfconsciously as a cat, his stubble sending sparks up Dean’s spine.

It continued to not happen when Cas pressed his mouth to Dean’s knuckles, then gently bit each one in turn. Dean’s eyelids fluttered shut just about the time that Charlie stuck her head through the entryway to the kitchen.

“Hey Cas, that piecrust _exhausted_ me, I’m gonna—oh. _Oh._ Right. Uh, yeah, cool, okay, sorry—”

Dean snatched back his hand as the front door to the house opened and then slammed shut. He couldn’t do much about the fact that he and Cas were now sitting right next to each other instead of at separate ends of the couch like normal heterosexual not-at-all-about-to-make-out dudes; but then he heard Charlie talking loudly in the living room.

“Oh my god, you’re both _disgusting_. Kevin, you look like a bukkake victim. Go shower right the fuck now.” She dropped her voice into a stage-whisper, which Dean could still easily hear. “You guys, I can’t believe it—Cas is talking about the Garrison. It’s like a solstice miracle. I just heard him say Naomi’s name. We gotta stay out of the kitchen, okay?”

“He’s talking to _Dean_?” That was Sam’s voice, confused, followed by more whispers and some scuffling sounds; then Sam cleared his throat and called through the door.

“Hey, Dean? I’m gonna hit the showers, man. Come up whenever, your stuff’s in my room and the bed’s already made up, okay?”

Dean stared at Cas, heart pounding. “Awesome, sounds good,” he hollered back heartily, exactly like a not-at-all-about-to-make-out dude, almost as if his hand were not now sliding over Cas’s thigh (which, dear god, those quadriceps).

Cas’s breath hitched audibly against sounds of shoes clomping up the stairs. He covered Dean’s hand with his own and pressed it down against him, as if to stop Dean from moving it from the top of Cas’s thigh to the inside (in fact exactly where Dean’s hand was headed).

But he wasn’t pushing away; his fingers tightened around Dean’s again almost convulsively. “Shit,” he said, eyes wide and still bright blue even in the almost-total darkness, just a faint flicker coming from the woodstove’s grate. They both swallowed loudly at the same time.

“Did you, like, witch-roofie me?” Dean asked, hoping sass would clear his head but only half-joking. “There should be a code of ethics against casting spells on godfearing folk.”

“There is, it’s called the Wiccan Rede, there’s also the Rule of Three but I don’t pay any attention to that one,” Cas husked, pressing their intertwined hands against his face again, like he was checking himself for a fever. “I do what I want.”

“And what…what kinds of things, do you, do you…want,” Dean choked out, in spite of the world’s terrible oxygen-shortage crisis. Cas’s lips ghosted against the inside of his wrist and when he moaned against the sensitive skin there, the vibrations made Dean’s ears ring.

“Just the usual stuff,” he said into Dean’s forearm, mouth skating upward. “World peace. Infinite wishes. A pony. Most recently, my housemate’s hot brother.” He rucked the plaid flannel shirtsleeve up with his nose as he progressed, now tracing patterns with the tip of his tongue, writing words in fucking Elvish, Dean didn’t know, it just was not at all how he’d thought _anything_ would—

Cas nosed at the inside bend of his elbow, licking at it steadily, his lips silky and his tongue damp, and they hadn’t even _kissed_ , and this seemed morally unfair; plus he’d pulled Dean’s hand almost as far behind him as possible in order to do whatever he was doing, so from there it seemed pretty obvious for Dean to card his fingers, _finally_ , into the silky hair at the nape of Cas’s neck, which made the next step even more obvious: namely, to tug gently until Cas’s head tipped back, exposing his throat, and then to start sucking kisses into it.

Cas made a sound that could only generously be called a squeak and Dean pulled him closer until their faces were approximately two millimeters apart. “We gotta be quiet,” he said into Cas’s mouth, open like a baby bird’s. He kissed both corners of it before sliding one hand around to angle Cas’s jaw ( _stubble_ ) just right, so that their mouths—

—fit together like they were fucking made for it, seamlessly and so hot and so _wet_ , and Cas tasted like cream and wine, and something underneath that which shouldn’t have been so intoxicating, except that it was, thus explaining why Dean was now stretched out on his back with Cas straddling him, fingers digging into Dean’s shoulders as they kissed, breaking apart to suck in air and going right back again. Dean’s head spun, from ethanol or hypoxia, or whatever Cas had put in the gløgg.

A lot of saliva and muffled groans later, Cas pulled back to whisper, “You’re so much more beautiful than your pictures. When you got out of your car I almost couldn’t look at you.”

Dean’s brain utterly failed to make sense of this statement, because it made no sense.

“It’s your eyes, I think,” Cas went on, apparently unaware that he was delusional. “From the photographs I thought they were brown, but they’re so green, and clear like rainwater, and you have these fucking adorable freckles, that I just want to—” He ducked his head to drop kisses on Dean’s cheekbones, under his eyes, across the bridge of his nose. Between them he kept on saying words but Dean had lost the ability to collect them into meaningful units.

“—told myself I wouldn’t but you’re so sexy. I should have known you’d be gorgeous, because of Sam, but—”

“Cas, hang on. What pictures? There _aren’t_ any pictures. I mean, there’s also not any gorgeous or sexy; but I’m not even really online, except to—”

 _Except to look at you_ , he’d almost said.

“On Sam’s laptop,” Cas explained, sitting back again. “I know you’re going to think I’m even weirder than you probably already do, it’s just that—ever since he moved in with us, Sam tells these stories, about when you were kids, and what happened with your dad, and _you_. Maybe you don’t even know how much he looks up to you, Dean. He talks about you all the time.” Cas ran his hands through his hair, somehow destroying it even further.

Dean resisted the impulse to reach up and comb through it with his own fingers, settling it like ruffled feathers. “Not really seeing how any of this makes you the weird one, Cas.”

Cas bit his lip and looked away, visibly embarrassed. “Well, but then he showed me pictures of you both, and I might have, okay, I _did_ —I looked you up at the university, and you’re also on the website for the fitness center, and that cardio research lab where you work.”

Vainly, and also in vain, Dean tried to remember what he looked like in those photos. He had no idea. Presumably wearing sweats, helping someone on a treadmill or spotting them using miniature pastel freeweights or rubber bands, flexing their injured joint, applying stim. Probably some terrible group shot where he always wound up in the back, grinning like a tool, or with eyes closed and mouth ajar in full-blown derp face.

No wonder Cas thought he was better-looking in person.

“It’s more than that, though. Ye gods, this is the part that’s probably going to sound completely insane to you. But it’s—it’s part of the craft.” He closed his eyes, face averted. “Sometimes I know things. Things that rationally, logically, I shouldn’t be able to know. It’s always been that way, ever since I was a child; and this has been even stronger.”

Seeing Cas turn his face away like that, like he was waiting for Dean to ridicule him, made something twist inside his chest. Dean let himself reach up and smooth the hair away from his forehead, where Cas had clutched it into demonic-looking little points. “I believe you, man.” He thought about his dad and shook his head. At some point maybe they’d talk about that. “All kinds of freaky-sounding stuff can happen. So believe me: I believe you.”

“It’s just—over the past semester, I started to feel like I know more about you than people I’ve dated for a year. And then I _saw_ you; and everything slid into place and it _clicked_.”

At this he shifted his center of gravity downward a few inches and unexpectedly a whole other thing started happening, a thing of drag and roughness and swollen discomfort that demanded friction. Dean reached out blindly and dug his fingers into Cas’s hipbones as Cas sucked in a ragged breath and bent backward, hands pressing down on Dean’s shins, and shoved his crotch, which was _radiating_ heat, against Dean’s in a single fierce thrust.

And then they both froze. Because that thing in particular was—was _way_ too fucking awesome of a thing to be happening—at all, probably; but especially tonight, especially after Dean had been in a car for two days straight, especially fully dressed in a kitchen with no doors and his brother upstairs; which, by the way, that would be the brother who didn’t know that Dean might be kind of gay (he _might_ be, okay, he really might be).

Even _more_ fucking awesome, if probably still not enough so to justify desperate dry-humping: how was it that this impossibly arousing man, who spoke a gabillion languages and made magic pie filling, was poised above him, his entire body shaking because he wanted Dean so badly—this kind of thing just did not _happen_ to Dean Winchester, this kind of _sex god_ didn’t shake his hand while suggestively stroking the inside of his wrist. That wasn’t part of Dean’s plotline. None of it was.

Dean let his breath out in a gust, and did maybe one of the most difficult, mature things he’d ever done in his adult life: he took his hands away from Castiel Milton’s body, releasing one hip at a time, which felt like fighting gravity on Jupiter.

Cas took the hint and moved backward until he was sitting on the leather of the couch, between Dean’s open knees, and they looked at each other, struggling to shut it down.

“I should probably go the fuck to sleep,” said Dean, once he could.

“Yeah, I—yeah. I’m making, I was going to make waffles tomorrow. Sam said you like waffles. It’ll be Wednesday,” Cas added irrelevantly.

Dean sat up carefully, resisting the temptation to grab at himself through his jeans, or rearrange his junk in any provocative way. His breath started to even out, and he tugged his shirt back into place, buttoning it; apparently it had been yanked up and down in different interesting ways, exposing his stomach at the hem and his upper chest at the collar.

Cas swung his legs resolutely off the sofa until his feet were on the floor again. The click of bootheels against hardwood reminded Dean that at no point during all this had Cas so much as rolled up a sleeve, much less taken off his boots.

“Cas, about what Charlie said?” Dean paused, then plunged ahead. “I get why you don’t ever talk about what happened. But I’d want to hear. If you ever did. Want to talk about it.”

Cas tightened his necktie back into its usual severe knot without answering. So it _was_ about them, about what he’d left behind, that whole every-inch-of-skin-covered-in-fabric thing. Dean wondered if Cas even knew that about himself, magic witchcraft powers or not.

He pressed on, hoping he’d know to stop before he went too far. “I can imagine this might a hard time of year. Not just because Sam teases you about the hark the herald angels.”

Cas looked at him, eyes grateful. “No, you’re right. It’s not easy; just probably not for the reasons you’d think. At the—when I was a child, we didn’t celebrate any holidays.”

Dean rubbed the back of his neck. “Seriously? Not even—I guess Halloween I could see skipping; but Christmas? That’s like the big birthday piñata party for baby Jesus, right?”

Cas huffed a laugh. “Yeah, not so much. Not for certain sects, anyway. They interpret parts of scripture to mean that one isn’t supposed to set any day above any other, not even birthdays, except for the Sabbath. And there’s that whole passage in Jeremiah forbidding Christmas trees.”

“The _Bible_ says that?”

“It’s pretty unequivocal, actually. To paraphrase: hey Israelites, don’t you dare cut down an evergreen tree and bring it into your house and stick it in a tub of water and hang gold and silver balls on it, like those tacky polytheists do, because God will smite your ass.”

He stood up and stretched, hands behind his head, and Dean’s eyes watered. Cas had clearly switched over into professorial mode now, though, and Dean didn’t want to stop him, especially if he was talking about something he never talked about. “In addition, Christmas iconography is obviously completely pagan in origin; all the emblems and rituals center around the symbolic death and rebirth of a sky deity or sun god. The fir, the holly, the mistletoe. A virgin birth, a holy infant. To say nothing of the fact that it falls on the solstice, despite the fact there’s absolutely no evidence the historical Christ was born in winter.”

Dean more or less kept up with all that, despite the marked shift in Cas’s diction. If they kept having conversations like this one, though, he might need to start taking notes.

He stood up, too, as much to help deal with the situation in his jeans as to signal to himself that he should be going to bed. He tried to be discreet about shaking out one pants leg slightly, hoping to encourage his dick to head in that direction, but of course Cas noticed, and half-smiled at him, a funny lopsided oh-I-saw-what-you-did-there smile.

“So—okay, let me see if I got this right. It’s not that you’re not a Christian anymore and don’t do Christmas like everyone else—that’s not what feels strange.” Dean thought a moment, then continued: “It’s that you _never_ celebrated Christmas, and now everyone around you _does_.”

Cas nodded. “Pretty much. In high school when people asked me about it, I’d just say I was Jewish. That at least made sense to them, so they’d leave me alone about it. I don’t miss Christmas carols—I actually don’t _know_ any carols. I never even heard the Beatles until I was 17. To this day people talk about—they make pop culture references, and I have no idea what they’re talking about.” He shook his head at himself, and opened the woodstove’s flue, reaching in with a poker to stir up the few remaining coals so they’d die out completely.

“You’ll laugh when you realize. I tried to educate myself, made these raids on cultural capital when we went to town and I could sneak off to the library, to the mall bookstore. But to this day I haven’t seen movies you grew up with, even though I’m a few years older than you are—I’ve never seen _E.T._ , or _Stand by Me_ , or _Pretty in Pink_ , or, I don’t know, _The_ fucking _Goonies_ , or about a hundred other names I hear my students throwing around.”

Dean didn’t say anything, just listened, while making a private resolution to get on Amazon at the next available opportunity and order a few belated…solstice presents.

(But surely… _Raiders of the Lost Ark? Star Wars?_ Living with Kevin and Charlie and Sam, the geeky trifecta, must have remedied some of this tragedy. _Die Hard?_ He’d ask Sam in the morning.)

“So yeah, that’s how much of a freak it made me, growing up in the Garrison—any average right-wing fundamentalist was more worldly and cosmopolitan and literate than I was. I mean, than I was when we—when Naomi and I left. Before she. She got breast cancer in my first year at Stanford and it metastasized really fast,” Cas said all in a rush, then stopped abruptly, looking horrified.

Dean recognized an incipient overshare freakout when he saw one, and in spite of himself he caught one of Cas’s hands between his, which turned out to be a bad idea because he could feel Cas trembling. Suddenly all he wanted out of life—after seven hours’ sleep, maybe—was to pull Cas against him and hold him until he knew he was safe and warm and could be still. And maybe take off some of his clothes.

That’s why he goes running, he realized. Something about the running—it’s one time he’s okay, is loose and relaxed and isn’t wound up tighter than a frigging banjo—either because of his, his _gift_ , or feeling shitty because he broke up with his culty-ass family.

Dean got that. Without a jump rope and heavy bag he wouldn’t have made it through the two years between Dad’s death and starting at KU, with Sam finishing high school in South Dakota at Ellen and Bobby’s while he stayed in Lawrence working odd jobs. Then at some point he’d realized you could get a scholarship to the Y, where they had weight machines, and showers; and that’s when everything had changed for him.

Sweating and moving and pushing your muscles until they shook, it made things better, not just then but later. It slowed your mind down, kept it from attacking you. He got that.

All at once he felt flooded, overwhelmed with the need to have Cas moving over him, to get their sweat all over each other. He clenched his jaw and gave Cas’s hand back to him like it was a potholder or a book or something. “Dammit, Cas. I have to go now, or I won’t. But I don’t think you’re wrong, okay—I looked at your pictures too. Those selfies you take after you run. And I feel like I sort of already know you. Which is bullshit, and crazy, and _wrong_. And all manner of hot. So let’s just, we should just—”

Dean had no idea how to finish that sentence.

“Make waffles?” asked Cas, head to one side and that flung-wide-open grin back on his face, its innocence at odds with his man-in-black elegance. Incongruous, Dean thought, like a baby in a trenchcoat.

“Yeah, Cas. Exactly. Let’s make fucking waffles. Also, guitar. I want to hear you play.”

“No carols, though,” said Cas soberly.

“No carols, no hymns, forever and ever, amen,” said Dean loopily as they headed out of the kitchen. Cas stopped for a second on the staircase, then went over to make sure the door was locked and unplug the tiny multicolored tree lights. He checked the water level in the metal base, then stood up, replacing a drooping strand of pink tinsel. “Fairy lights.”

Dean squinted, holding himself up by the banister, his exhaustion finally plowing into him.

“Dude, what? Fairies?”

“That’s what Christmas lights called in Britain: fairy lights. I like that better.”

Dean smothered a yawn. “Well, you would. For various reasons.” When Cas joined him up on the landing, he bodychecked him the same way he would Sam, an unconscious bit of drowsy fraternal roughhousing.

Cas _growled_. “No, Dean. Not with me. Let me bottom-line it for you—” He grabbed Dean’s face in both hands and pulled his mouth down, kissing him fiercely. Then, just as suddenly, he let him go and moved swiftly past him on the stairs.

The door to his bedroom had clicked quietly shut behind him before Dean even managed to open his eyes, touching his bruised lower lip in astonishment.

Cas, Dean concluded without difficulty, was awesome. (That goddamned _voice_.)

Cas was also, most definitely, male.

And Sam didn’t know.

And Dean Winchester was so, so fucked.

•

By the night of the party, he was still totally fucked. Except he hadn’t been fucked, because they were never ever alone, and apparently none of the doors in the entire house locked, and somehow Sam still had no idea (how did he have no idea, whenever Cas walked into the room Dean’s entire body started vibrating). Dean felt about fifteen, at this point. Every other thought had Cas in it and he had to police all his sentences, so they didn’t turn into girlish litanies of “You know, Cas says—” or “Cas told me about this one time when—”

It was bad. Only also really good. So good he would catch himself grinning at nothing: in the shower, with a mouthful of pancakes, during television commercials, listening to Charlie and Sam squabble about the correct proportions for homemade barbecue sauce, covertly measuring the windowpanes and looking up pricing online for double-glazed units.

The part where he wasn’t naked in Cas’s bed, though, but stretched out on the squeaky lumpy rollaway in Sam’s room the last three nights, staring sleeplessly up at the ceiling listening to his brother snore and thrash and wrestle with the covers—that part was bad.

But everything else was good. Everything else was fucking amazing. Both nights they’d stayed up late, too late, taking turns playing guitar quietly on the front porch so as not to keep the others awake. Cas immediately picked up every song Dean knew, usually able to play along within the first eight bars. Dean wanted to hate him for it but the sight of Cas’s slim, supple fingers, pulling and tapping and teasing and moving over the steel strings of his Martin—it was too mesmerizing, and Dean had plans for those fingers, oh he had plans.

And they talked until their throats were sore, about everything from Lisa’s walking in on him and Aaron (Cas seemed to find that story funnier than Dean thought he should) to Cas telling him how Naomi, once she’d recovered from the worst of the Garrison headfuckery, had taught Cas how to read music and speak French and cook, and gotten him into therapy, and even taken him to an occult bookstore to find him a teacher for his witchy stuff, which Cas called Feri, but he spelled it differently.

“No, F-E-R-I. Like iron: ferrous.”

“I thought fairies hated iron?”

“How on earth do you know about that?” Cas had scrunched up his nose, quizzical. Dean didn’t find that cute at all. “But no, it’s much more complicated. Iron is…important to them, let’s put it that way. The fey aren’t simple, after all, they’ve been around a long time. Like musical scales, or time signatures—they’re far older than humans, they’re ancient beings.”

At this point Dean felt like an ancient being himself, trying to ogle Cas any time no one was looking, all but leering when no one else was in the room. Other than frustratingly brief makeout sessions against the washing machine in the basement, during one of which Dean almost came in his pants like an eighth-grader, they hadn’t even gotten to first base.

Actually he wasn’t even sure what first base was, with a guy. Maybe he’d been to it and missed it.

But he was ready for home plate, that much he knew, and there were only so many times Cas could pretend to show him how to use the washer and where the laundry soap was.

With every conversation, every new insight into Cas’s approach to the world and his quirky mind and curving devious smile, with every stolen taste of his mouth, with every little sound he pulled out of him, Dean was more and more sure: this wasn’t just a thing. This was—this was serious. And hot. And he wanted it, all of it, and Sam was just going to have to deal.

He realized that he’d said most of that last part aloud to himself, standing in the kitchen and watching a bunch of drunk people try to dance to “Killing In The Name Of.” He’d also been gripping his red Solo cup so tightly it had started to crack. _Get it together, Winchester_ , he told himself, slinging beer foam off his hand and wiping it on his jeans.

A bunch of chem majors (one of whom was Kevin, actually double-majoring in chemistry and computer science although for some reason he hadn’t wanted to admit this to anyone; it had taken Charlie all year to ferret out that his secret evening activity wasn’t an affair but a biochem lab section, and she was still mad) were headbanging and leaping angrily around the box of dry ice they’d dragged into the center of the dining room. Dean was watching them not only because he loved RATM but he was impressed that Kevin could fling himself that high into the air and somehow just hang out for a while before descending. He should have been a ballet dancer, or a martial artist, or a really vertically challenged point guard.

Dean wondered about Cas not dancing, since his body seemed made to move. Did he go to clubs, did he get his freak on? After a place like the Garrison, wouldn’t you do some kind of pendulum swing and wind up slathered against strangers at sweaty raves? Dean himself didn’t dance because he was a shitty dancer, except for the kind where you felt each other up under the cover of swaying in a clockwise circle. Would Cas slow-dance with him?

With his uncanny ability to be right there whenever Dean was thinking about him, although to be fair that was pretty much most of the time, Cas came up behind him and touched him on one shoulder.

Dean turned around smiling, but his smile vanished when he saw Cas’s face: desperate, pale above his dark blue shirt.

Right at that moment, Zack de la Rocha started screaming _Fuck you I won't do what you tell me_ so there was no point in trying to talk, the decibel level was deafening.

Dean tried to ask with his eyes, instead: _What’s wrong? Can I help?_

He let Cas pry the leaking plastic cup out of his hand, set it down somewhere, and hustle him up the staircase, through the crowd of people in the living room. He had no idea where Charlie was, and hadn’t seen Sam and Jess for hours; which, obvious conclusion there.

You could feel the party starting to tip like a drunk person does: just on the edge of being loud and funny, about to turn obnoxious and maybe cry or try to hit you or tell you it had always been secretly in love with you, before throwing up in the floorboards of your car.

Dean didn’t put up any resistance as Cas all but shoved him into his bedroom, then let go of Dean’s hand, whirling to shut the door behind them.

To Dean’s surprise, they were alone. How Cas had kept the party out of his room, he couldn’t imagine. Although an increasing number of questions like that could be cleared up with a one-word answer—“witch,” Charlie would shrug, her usual explanation for something Cas had managed to pull off despite the fact that it shouldn’t have been entirely possible.

He hadn’t been in Cas’s room up until now, just seen it from the hallway. It was tidy, bare hardwood floors, mostly empty except for a small bookcase and the queen-sized (Dean swallowed) bed. Also an altar, with two candles at either end and a bunch of fascinating-looking objects that Dean figured it would be rude to stare at; a black meditation cushion, on some kind of square mat.

He couldn’t help but notice, though, that all the bedding had been shoved off the bed onto the floor and there were just sheets, dark blue sheets, with white clouds on them.

Maybe Cas was a restless sleeper. Who just, you know. Kept a strip of condoms and lube on one pillow.

•

They looked at each other, and then Cas reached for him, longing written all over his face.

Cas barreled him into the back of the door, where Dean felt something soft behind his head (a bathrobe? towels?). He cupped Dean’s face in both hands, lips moving against his, and said into his mouth, with that voice like wet rumpled velvet, “I can’t keep doing this. Dean. I need more. I need you.”

“I’m so, okay, _yes_ ,” he said coherently, trying to nod against the grip of Cas’s hands, feeling Cas’s stubble ( _stubble_ ) rasp against his own. Their mouths clung together, and Dean pulled Cas into him, opening his legs, wanting every inch of him. “Yes, absolutely. If we have to move furniture against the door to keep them out, and I swear I’m going to Home Depot after New Year and buying deadbolts and retrofitting the whole goddamn house, but yes, now, _yes,_ Cas, _please_ —”

There was no way he had just said _please_. Winchesters didn’t say _please_. But it had been an okay thing to say after all, because Cas’s eyes went utterly wild, and Dean could feel his heart hammering through all their clothes. So many clothes.

He experimented, said some more words, mostly single syllables (“fuck, yes, oh my _god_ yes”) as Cas bit down savagely on the side of his neck (no way he would be able to hide that one later) and ground his crotch against Dean’s, in a steadily increasing rhythm.

Dean didn’t think he’d ever been this hard in his life. His hands on that tight runner’s ass, feeling it clench with every thrust. Cas reached down, palming Dean’s cock through the heavy denim. Dean bit his lip to keep from groaning.

“Jesus, Cas, wait.” Officially too many clothes. He fumbled for the hem of Cas’s shirt, where it was tucked tightly into his pants, and felt him go still, his spike of fear almost visible.

“Cas, baby.” _What the fuck, had he really just called him that_. Cas’s dilated pupils pulled him in again and Dean kissed him lingeringly, but kept going. “Baby. You realize this means undressing, right? I love the way your pants fit” (he squeezed, and Cas thrust up against him) “but there’s no way I’m having sex with you for the first time fully dressed.”

He reached for Cas’s wrist and undid his cuff, and Cas yanked his arm away, face confused.

He wanted this, Dean knew. They both did. What was—

Expressions Dean couldn’t read warred on Cas's face. “If I do this. If we.”

“Then we’ll do it, and it’ll feel really good. Don’t get me wrong, I love this too,” said Dean, gesturing vaguely downward. “And, uh, lest there be any confusion, by _this_ I mean the feeling of your cock plastered against my jeans, and the filthy fucking sounds you make when you’re turned on.”

At this Cas made exactly such a sound, and shoved Dean’s hands up over his head, pinning them at the wrist, sucking on his collarbone.

“But it's not fair, Cas,” Dean continued, gasping. “You get to touch me. Your mouth is actually—oh my fucking god—it’s on my _skin_ —right now.” He forged ahead stubbornly. “But you won’t let me see your skin, except for your hands, and your, _shit_ , your beautiful—” he leaned out and nipped at it “—fucking mouth, that I want all over me. But the rest of you. I need it all. You need it. I’ll make it amazing for you. Let me touch you, Cas.”

He lowered his head and mouthed at Cas’s nipple, dragging his tongue over the cotton, feeling it harden even through the shirt, leaving a damp circle on the fabric. He bit down lightly until a shudder rippled through Cas which seemed more convincing than anything Dean had said.

“Okay,” he said, roughly. “Since you put it that way. I concede. Also, given what’s going on out there—” (they listened for a few seconds to the party raging like the howls of the damned, although it also sounded suspiciously like someone was singing into a vacuum cleaner) “—no one’s going to be looking for us. So if it’s just you—then okay. I surrender.”

He let go of Dean's hands to hold out his other cuff, face trusting. Dean flicked open the button, thumb pressing against Castiel’s pulse, breathing harder. Cas’s left eyebrow flew up in that delicate arch that also managed to look completely wicked, and twisted his neck, loosening his tie.

Dean felt his mouth go sandpaper.

Cas took a few steps back, yanked his tie nearly off and started undoing his shirt. Dean reached out for him, then stopped himself—he needed to watch, and if he moved forward he wouldn’t be able to see what Cas was doing, which was, he could already tell, well worth seeing.

Cas was undressing. Voluntarily. Dean’s tongue felt too big to fit inside his mouth and he didn’t know where to put his hands, and Cas watched him out of the corner of one eye, his expression more gleeful by the second ( _that little shit, he_ knows _what this is doing to me_ ).

Cas finally finished unbuttoning and in one lithe movement tore shirt and tie together over his head and threw them on the floor behind him without looking, kicking off his shoes at the same time. Without taking his eyes from Dean’s, he tore open his trousers and shoved them along with socks ( _no boxers, fuck, if I’d known that three days ago_ ) all the way down, unhesitating. And stood there totally nude, not flinching, not backing down, eyes ablaze.

Dean blinked. Cas’s arms, shoulders, and the upper part of his chest were covered in tattoos.

Winding, delicate, filigreed, scrolls and curls of black and silver and rose and eggshell blue and violet, waves and feathers and leaves and branches and rivulets and petals, and Dean felt like he might pass out.

None of this was fair, none of it had been fair since he’d first been enough of a girl to look up @NonSumAngelus and crush out over running selfies.

Heading the list of epic unfairnesses was Cas covered in ink and without any clothes on, and Dean still fully dressed. He let his gaze drop down, finally, to the uncut cock swollen and red and shiny at its tip with precome. He didn’t know what to touch or lick first, or if he even could.

Cas stepped right back up into Dean’s space, taking both of Dean’s hands and then just _putting_ them on his naked _skin_ like they fucking _belonged_ there, sidling closer, his breath on Dean’s face, although he himself was unable to breathe because of all the warm smooth inked skin beneath his palms and the devastating nearness of Cas’s dick to his own, those huge eyes unblinking, watching Dean closely, waiting for something, waiting.

Why was he paralyzed. He should pull him closer, he should kiss him, he should—

“Is this what you wanted,” Cas growled.

“I want anything you’ll let me have,” Dean answered bluntly, too destroyed to be anything less than totally honest, and watched as Cas’s tongue darted out, pink between his lips.

He leaned forward to chase it back into his mouth, and apparently that was enough invitation, Cas just _pulsed_ into him, his entire body moving as a single incomprehensible liquid toward Dean, his hips fitting into his like hot silk and Dean thought—just this, Cas putting his skin finally on Dean’s skin, now that he’d had this, just this would be enough and he could crawl back to Kansas and die, and Sam wouldn’t ever have to know anything, and Cas could laugh at him, about how one time he’d fucked a boring guy from the Midwest—

Cas _was_ laughing, had broken away to laugh, but Dean could tell it was okay, it was with pure pleasure, and then he brought his lips right back again so that their mouths clung together and Cas’s tongue, oh god. It was the best tongue to ever—Cas surged against him, sucking Dean’s tongue into his own mouth, and Dean fought the urge to beg, and instead reached down between them to wrap his hand finally around—

“Dean, _wait_. One more thing.”

Cas pulled back and Dean’s hand closed around nothing, bewildered by the sudden chilly rush of air between them. He somehow didn’t start breaking shit and knocking over furniture when Cas retreated even farther backward, hands out in front of him.

“I gotta tell you, man, you’re cockblocking yourself at this point. What the fuck?”

But Cas had crossed his arms in front of his chest, his characteristic self-protective gesture, and was looking directly at Dean with that already familiar pissy expression on his face, notwithstanding the erection sticking out from his groin at an almost ninety-degree angle.

Dean shook his head to clear it, voice thick. “Cas, what is it?”

“I can tell,” Cas gritted out, his voice shaken but clear, “what you’re thinking. That you can—that we can just do this and you can cover it up and leave, and not have to deal with it. I need to know that it’s—that you really want this. With me, with a man. You’re not out of the closet. Sam doesn’t know—he doesn’t know anything, I’m starting to realize. About what happened with your dad, or you.” Dean closed his eyes, not wanting to have this conversation right now or preferably ever.

“But we can already tell this isn’t just—just a _thing_ , okay? And even if it were. I won’t lie about you anymore, or pretend in front of other people. I know we just met, and we haven’t even—but I can’t. Every time I lie about who I am, about what I am, it just fucks me up, so if they ask, okay, even if _Sam_ asks, you should know that I’m going to—”

“Okay. Come here,” Dean said hoarsely, and reached for him. “You’re naked. Come back.”

Cas stayed where he was, but his face softened. “Dean, I don’t know what’s best for you. If it’s not the right time for you to be out to Sam, or yourself, I don’t want to force you into—”

“ _Forcing_ , what the—good god, no. I mean actually forcefulness is good, I like it when you push me around, but why would I ever—I _do_ want this, Cas. I want you so badly, I’m done hiding it, I can’t either, _Cas_ , would you just stop fucking _talking_ —”

He seemed incapable of completing sentences, only able to curling his fingers against his palms and fight for breath. He couldn’t believe he wasn’t already on his knees buried to the nose in Cas’s dark curled hair, swallowing down the bitter clear fluid he could see, just glistening at the tip.

Their gazes locked for what felt like a decade. Cas finally looked away, tears in his eyes. “It’s—it’s happened before. With guys who didn’t—” He steadied his voice, went on.

“They wake up and see me and flip out. And it _shreds_ me, Dean; it’s taken a decade of therapy not to think I’m so bad I deserve to die. For years I thought should be thrown back into the Garrison and prayed over until they cast out my demons. Which, believe me, they tried that. They tried for _years_. But it’s true, you can’t pray the fucking gay away. And now? I can’t handle it, that big morning-after no-homo I-ain't-no-queer panic. It triggers the _shit_ out of me.”

His mouth thinned, lips pressed together until they were almost white. Someone else might have thought he was angry; Dean recognized it by now, Cas’s brittle defended terror. His head dropped until he was looking at the floor instead of Dean.

 _Nope_ , thought Dean, _just no. Not like this_. What was it Cas had said, that first night on the staircase?

“Let bottom-line it for you, baby,” he said softly, stepping forward and tilting Cas’s chin back up with his fingers until they were eye-to-eye again.

“I’ll say this as many times as you need to hear it: You didn’t do _anything_ wrong. There is _nothing_ wrong with you. And anything you want to do with me, or to me, or onto my face—and I mean _anything_ , Cas, if there’s any freaky shit you need to work out I am the guy to do it with, because I gotta tell you, I want you so badly I can’t make a fist— _anything_ you want is good. If you want it—just because it’s you, it’ll be good for me too. Really, really good.”

A gradual smile was spreading across Cas's face, like the fucking sun coming up, his eyes still gleaming with tears. He sniffled and even that seemed somehow aristocratic and sexy. How could one naked grad student with an angel name be simultaneously so pure and so dirty, Dean couldn't take another second of this.

“But whatever you want to do, I really need you to do it _right the fuck now_ , Cas, because either we finally get off together or I’m going to have a stroke. The very first goddamn time you—”

That was all, because Cas pulled him backward onto the bed and had one hand shoved down his pants, and Dean closed his mouth over Castiel’s trapezius and cried out.

In a flurry of zippers and fabric, they undressed Dean together, Cas all but clawing his t-shirt off over his head before sliding down beneath him and licking his stomach, his thighs, his dick, Dean trying to prop himself up on trembling arms and not collapse onto him.

“Fuck, Cas, if you do that I can’t—”

Cas flipped him over, surprisingly strong considering Dean probably had forty pounds on him, and spread Dean’s thighs with both hands, swallowing him all the way down in one movement, then immediately sliding up and back down, Cas’s throat convulsing around him and punching a guttural shout out of Dean he hadn’t known he could make. He clapped one hand over his own mouth, writhing, then knotted the fingers of his other hand in Cas’s silky hair (which already looked like they’d been making love for days). Dean was about three parsecs away from coming when he dragged Cas off his cock and up to his face.

Cas’s mouth was red and slick, still hanging open, saliva dripping onto Dean’s face as he coughed and sucked in air, and Dean bit desperately at his lips, feeling an inexplicable urge to slap him, or be slapped, or beg Cas to tie him up and spank him until he wept. “You do some weird fucking shit to me, man,” he croaked, before fumbling for the lube and all but throwing it at Cas, spreading his thighs, which he’d clamped shut trying not to come.

His sex-haired witch took the bottle, eyes narrowing. “Are you—I mean, I kind of assumed—”

“Yeah, well, assume nothing. I don’t get out much.”

Cas muffled a laugh by sucking one of Dean’s nipples while flicking the other, and this time Dean didn’t even cover his mouth. No one could hear anything anyway. He could shout himself hoarse. He suspected he might.

“That’s actually exactly what I assumed. Have you ever bottomed before?”

Dean gulped. “Does it matter? Everything has to happen for the first time sometime. I want all of you, not just your hand or your mouth. I don’t want you on me, I want you in me.”

Somehow, he knew in the part of his brain that still worked, this had to be different from Aaron, from other guys at the gym, from quick handjobs and blowjobs that could be wiped away so fast it was like they hadn’t happened, and he could go on pretending. He needed—

“Bruise me, mark me, hurt me—I don’t care, I meant it, I want everything you’ll— _jesus fucking christ_.”

Mouthing at the base of his cock, Cas crouched between his thighs, sliding two warm wet fingers up and down, whispering words not in English, words with lots of harsh consonants, tonguing at his balls. Dean gave up completely trying to be quiet and just let himself feel, thinking _this explains so much, about everything,_ but he couldn’t have said what.

Cas hiked up both Dean’s knees so his feet were flat on the bed, then tugged on his hips with his free hand, starting them rocking gently, so that every time they moved forward, the tip of his dick brushed between Cas’s lips, and when they moved backward, he slid down a little further on those fingers.

Cas’s fingers. The same long slender clever ones that flashed across a piano keyboard. Fingers now wrapped around one of his ankles, keeping him grounded even while the others teased into him, slippery and smooth and strong, taking him apart with every increment.

“Shit, I didn’t even, how come no one ever tells you about this, Cas, don’t stop—”

Cas hummed and licked a fat circle around the head of his cock. “Because they know if they told you, you’d never leave the house again. And someone has to mow the lawn.”

He flipped open the lube bottle and dripped more into his palm, letting it slide down to his fingers so it was warmer by the time Dean felt it slicking into him. He tried not to hold his breath, eased down onto Cas’s hand, letting his fingers go deeper this time, feeling them stretching up into him.

It didn’t hurt, it felt strange, but he couldn’t think anything except _more_ , needing _more_ ; and he must have said this aloud, because Cas chuckled, worrying at Dean’s hipbone with his teeth. “If you want more, take more. I’m not doing this, you’re doing it. I’m just here. My god, I’m so here. You look incredible, fucking yourself onto my hand. I just—I want to eat you out, but there’s kind of a lot of lube, and I also want to _watch_ you. Oh fuck.”

He ripped his hand away from Dean’s ankle, clenching it around the base of his cock, and Dean cursed the fact that it was so far away and he couldn’t do that for Cas, couldn’t reach him, couldn’t do anything but fist the sheets and keep rocking, the sounds he made unbelievable to his own ears, Cas panting and saying, “Okay, okay, but just wait, there’s, there’s something else, let me, hold still a second—”

Everything shorted out. Dean’s field of vision sparked green and then white as Cas rotated his wrist and thrust his fingers against what Dean guessed was his prostate. He knew he’d shouted but couldn’t hear or see anything for an interminable couple of seconds. After Dean dragged in a breath, Cas stroked it again, much more gently this time, pressing a kiss against the inside of Dean’s knee, and the feeling came back and spread all over his skin, but he didn’t feel like he was about to pass out this time, and he moaned but didn’t scream.

His eyes weren’t wet. He was fine. “Hey,” Cas soothed, leaving his fingers buried inside Dean but sliding up to cover his chest and neck with kisses, “It’s a lot, I know, I just wanted to find out how sensitive you are, and, shit, Dean, you’re amazing. So beautiful, in every way. So perfect. So good.”

Cas crooned down at him, licking into his mouth. As they kissed, more slowly and deeply than before, Dean let go of his death clutch on the sheets, running his hands across Cas’s shoulders ( _feathers, ocean waves, leaves_ ) and just breathing, in and out, as Cas kept moving inside him, occasionally brushing cautiously against that place.

Cas let go of Dean’s mouth, chased his eyes until he caught them. “I’m going to—”

Dean nodded, glad he didn’t have to ask, kissing Cas’s throat. He snagged the strip of condoms and managed to tear one open without ripping it all the way through.

Cas withdrew his hand from between Dean’s legs and its sudden absence stunned him, and now he knew he was going to beg, because where had Cas gone, why was he over _there_ and not _here_ —

“I’ve got you,” Cas breathed, rolling on latex and stroking himself at the same time, lube dripping down cold onto Dean’s belly as he clutched at Cas. “I’ve got you, let me fuck you, oh god I want to make you come—”

“Listen to the mouth on you,” Dean faltered, as if there were any remnants of smart-ass left, as if he weren’t almost in tears as Cas, with wrenching deliberate slowness, held Dean open with one hand and started to slip into him the same way he’d fingered him, holding completely still, letting Dean’s hips move and take in more and more.

“Cas, how can you not, why won’t you _move_ ,” Dean bit out. Cas didn’t take his eyes off the place where they were joined, just watched, mesmerized, as Dean in frustration bucked down onto him and finally felt Cas pressed all the way up against him, still not moving.

Dean reached down for his cock, only to have his hand knocked away. “Only me,” was all Cas said by way of explanation, folding Dean up beneath him somehow and finally, _finally_ starting to fuck into him.

He understood then, hanging on to Cas and making grunting sounds he wouldn’t want to think about later, breath jarred out of him every time Cas thrust. It still didn’t hurt but it was already easily the most intense sex he’d ever had; and then Cas shouldered Dean’s calves and moved more upward than inward, and grazed that spot inside him; and did it again, and again.

All the gay porn he’d ever seen (accidentally, of course) now made sense. The guys with their eyes rolling back in their heads, cocks drooling precome, shooting off untouched. His own cock was pressed securely between their wet stomachs. With Cas’s every movement he could feel it building, snarling and tangling low in his pelvis, starting to coil and gather, as Cas whispered into his hair, fucking him tenderly and expertly and with utter attention—

“Cas,” he half-sobbed, “What language?"

He felt air against his forehead as Cas laughed. “Mostly English. I said you’re so tight, I can’t believe I’m the first one inside you, that you’re letting me fuck your beautiful ass, that I’m taking your virginity in my bed and I’m going to make you come so hard, so hard Dean, so hard for me, so good—”

Dean clung to him, every muscle in his body locking up as Cas kept moving, relentlessly, like surf or backbeat or a combustion engine, not speeding up, not slowing down, fucking into him again and again without letting go, without stopping, just rocking, pulsing, undulating, chanting into his ear, licking the curve of it—

“That’s right, Dean, just like that, yes, I can feel you, just let it happen, you don’t have to do anything, I’m doing this part, I’ve got you, let me do this for you, let me take you with me, just let go, just come for me, oh god, _fuck_ you’re so fucking sweet, just come for me, love, come now, come, _come_ —”

Their mouths found each other as Dean’s entire body went rigid, spasming under Cas, pleasure too great even to cry out as he exploded, shooting again and again while Cas kept plunging into him steadily, feeling like he was being emptied out with every hot spurt, pierced and beaten from the inside like a drum, tearing his mouth away from Cas’s only after the highest point of the arc because coming down the other side of it somehow felt even better, sharper instead of deeper, and now he did scream, shouting Cas’s name over and over again with each thrust, feeling himself contract around him until Cas let out an unholy high-pitched cry and stiffened above him, then drove as far down into Dean as he could, his head flung back, and unbelievably Dean could feel it, even through the condom, feel the thick heat of him as he came, and he pressed his lips against Cas’s sternum, still saying his name, throat raw, clutching around him, drawing out the contractions, pulling his orgasm out of him, now he was the one doing the rocking, and gathering Cas trembling into his arms, licking the sweat away from his hairline, praising him, cradling him, Cas had called him “love” and what else could this be but that, this body against his, this stupidly beautiful man, ribs heaving and fumbling his dick out of him, pinching off the condom and dropping it over the side of the bed, both of them furling into each other, small kisses, feathery touches before collapsing, breathing in unison, until Dean flopped onto his back and started laughing, which wasn’t fair because Cas clearly couldn’t move enough to lift his head to ask why.

And Dean got that, his own arms and legs were made of lead or clay or rubber. But as a result all he could see was one confused blue eye peering up at him from half-underneath a pillow, and this just made him laugh harder. Bewildered Cas was maybe his favorite Cas, although there was also hacked-off cranky Cas, or arrogant silk-necktie Cas, or self-cockblocking Cas who wanted to have like ten simultaneous conversations about boundaries and consequences before he would take off his goddamned clothes, or comparative literature Cas mashing all his languages together carelessly and assuming people knew what the hell he was saying; but now he had a new favorite Cas, which was the fierce relentless windstorm that had just fucked him single-mindedly from one side of the mattress to the other—

“Dude, we’re about to fall off.” Dean wrapped his arms around Cas and somehow, with one big flop, heaved them back toward the middle of the bed, trying to ignore the cold liquefying semen trickling off the sides of his torso, drizzling onto the sheets. Cas could read minds, though, or just knew what it was like to have come all over your chest, and after a second his hand poked Dean in the arm, offering him…a sock.

“Are you kidding me, that’s so gross,” he said, accepting it gratefully and then tossing it as far away as he could. There was a tiny crash from somewhere over by the altar. The blue eye opened again, accusingly.

Cas’s voice was muffled. “Why were you laughing?”

Dean raised up on one elbow and pushed the pillow down so he could see all of Cas’s face. It was a good face, he decided. Especially now, with flushed cheeks and dark winged eyebrows and soft black lashes when Cas couldn’t keep his eyes open and they fluttered shut again. _He’s relaxed_ , Dean realized, feeling inordinately pleased with himself for pumping Cas full of all the endorphins of a runner’s high.

He reached for one of Cas’s hands, from where Cas had them drawn up tightly against his chest, kissed the palm, and brought it against his own bare chest, tracing the tattooed patterns on his shoulders, wondering about the stories behind every color, every line.

“I was laughing because of what you said—that if they told us what it was like we’d never leave the house.”

Cas’s eyes flew open again and his mouth curved upward. “So don’t. Don’t leave the house. Never leave my bedroom. In fact, never leave my bed. Stay here. I’ll bring you sandwiches.”

Dean stopped laughing, because he’d already been thinking pretty much the same thing. Not the sandwiches part, but the rest. He brought Cas’s hand up to his lips, slowly, kissing each fingertip one at a time. “I only have one semester left,” he said, so quietly he wasn’t even sure he’d heard himself say it.

Cas flew up against him, somehow, from every side, all adhesive limbs and clinging mouth, and they tangled together until Dean felt a sly hand starting to gently pet his cock, which twitched in spite of him. He groaned and tried to disengage Cas, who was suddenly all handsy. “Okay, _no_. Not yet, Romeo. For one thing, I have to pee—cut it out, what are you, an octopus? For another, maybe we should make sure your house isn’t on fire.”

(Later, they would agree that hadn’t been maybe the wisest speculation to make aloud. _Spellcasting_ , Cas called it; things you say coming true once you put voice and thought to them.) “And finally,” he said, eyeing his clothes strewn across the bed and floor, but uninvested in collecting them much less putting them back on just quite yet, “I’m hungry. And I was promised sandwiches.”

“Fine,” huffed Cas, and before Dean could grab at him he’d sprung off the bed and was zipping up his slacks and turning his shirt right-side out, opening the closet door and pulling clean socks out of a drawer. “Really, dude—commando?” Dean asked, remembering Cas undressing. “Is that like, all the time, or just for special occasions?”

Cas tossed his jeans up onto the bed. “Put your clothes on, Dean. They’re playing our song.” He flipped his collar down over his necktie and drew up the knot, head to one side, listening.

Dean wrinkled his forehead, trying to hear. “I don’t—I don’t know this song.”

Cas raised an eyebrow, slipping a finger into the heel of each shoe as he slid them back on. “How can this be—I, the sheltered little Amish schoolgirl, know a piece of pop culture that the great Dean Winchester doesn’t?” He ducked the pillow Dean threw, which hit the back of the door, and then grabbed it and threw it back. “It’s Lady Gaga, you barbarian. ‘Born This Way’?”

 _Guess that answers the question about whether he goes dancing_ , Dean thought, amused, pulling his t-shirt back over his head.

“Whatever, just give me my boxers. At least I _wear_ them, who’s _really_ the barbarian?”

Cas held up Dean's boxer briefs, which were navy blue and covered with tiny yellow pencils, pronouncing, “Phallic." Instead of throwing them, he came over to the bed to put them back onto Dean himself, kissing the inside of his ankle, calf, knee, and thigh until he snapped the elastic in place, after which Dean had to thoroughly ruin the moment by reaching down into them and adjusting himself, because having Cas between his legs at all now apparently gave him an automatic boner.

Cas looked pleased with himself, and kissed the top of Dean’s head. “Come find me, okay? I’ll try to get to the kitchen but I’ve got a weird feeling, I want to get down there and see what’s going on.”

He slipped out, closing the door without looking back and Dean had a flash of something, a ghostly flicker across the front of his awareness that said _holy fucking shit I’m in Cas Milton’s bedroom and he just shagged me nearly into unconsciousness and I promised him I wouldn’t have a big gay freakout and I won’t, I’m actually fine, and I’m about to come out to my brother, either tonight or tomorrow, and actually tonight may already_ be _tomorrow_ —

That’s when he heard it, downstairs.

Dean had his hand on the doorknob before his jeans were even zipped up all the way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is no beta like unto the betaing which is betaed by [Betty Days](http://bettydays.tumblr.com/), and you _know_ that's true. Unfortunately some fledgling writers who shall go unnamed, but who are me, like to push things right up to the deadline; so Betts only got to see about half of this. That's the half that's good. The other half, I wrote without anyone pointing out the fact that I use the word "shuddered" eighteen times, five of which occur in the same paragraph. So feel free to point out mistakes (I will love you forever if you do this) in separate comments, which I will tidily delete once I've repaired the error/s.
> 
> Also! It's still not finished! I know, right! Because I'm legit cray! And these idiots—I just somehow can never deal with all their bullshit in under a gabillion words. So Chapter Two will post sometime this week. Sorry to have left you with sort of a cliffhanger, but I just couldn't get it done in time, while still also accomplishing mission-critical stuff like, you know, sleeping and eating and watching fanvids.
> 
> Finally! You're the best. Come find me on my multifandom slash [tumblr](http://bert-and-ernie-are-gay.tumblr.com) if you have questions, or are bored and want to see pictures of cats, way too many pretty white dudes, and an embarrassing amount of _Supernatural._ Because, hello genre television network: I don't own your infuriating characters nor their unevenly attended-to narrative: they apparently own _my_ sorry ass.
> 
> Happy solstice, darlings—
> 
> PS and many thanks to [the Dear and the Diva](http://a-collectivemind.tumblr.com/), for letting me play. Don't ever change.
> 
> PPS almost forgot to mention: the [Dead Houses](http://cgi.stanford.edu/~group-synergy/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.DeadHouses) are a real thing, in Palo Alto, a co-operative community where Stanford students actually live. And [Box of Rain](http://cgi.stanford.edu/~group-synergy/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.BoxOfRain) is one of the Dead Houses. But I've never been there, no harm or ill-will is intended to its owner and residents (who are probably way more well-behaved than the crew of people I've moved in), and frankly I only know about as much as Dean Winchester does, thanks to Google Street View and an overactive imagination.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Later, when teasing Cas about the Infamous Solstice House Party Fire, Dean liked to accompany his hilarious reenactment (in which he played all the parts, of course) with mouth-kazoo—if not “The Final Countdown,” or the Looney Tunes version of the Mexican Hat Dance song (which he’d learned in Spanish class was actually called "El Jarabe Tapatío"), then a ditty Dean knew only as “clown-car music,” his recital of which went something like this:
> 
> DOOT doot _toodle_ -oodle, DOOT doot _too_ -doo!
> 
> —which practically guaranteed Cas would not only complain and throw things but usually start biting and/or tickling him; and how was he supposed to pass up such an opportunity?

As Dean sped downstairs, he found it a little more uncomfortable to be upright and in rapid motion than he’d first thought.

Which was only fair, given the unprecedented circumstances of the last hour.

Sadly, he had no time to dwell on its happy events—nor on assorted aching twinges, nor various unusual but by no means unpleasant slippery sensations—because what the _fuck_ was that ungodly _sound_ , that had cut through the oompa-oompa of Charlie’s club music?

He tried to parse it past-tense as he moved (gripping the banister perhaps more firmly than usual). It had been earsplitting upstairs when it crescendoed, then had tapering to an agonized conclusion—some combination of both banshee-like shriek, plus tremendous slow splintering crack that sounded like branches ripping off in a windstorm, or trees going down under snowmass.

Beneath it all, that ongoing strange droning sound like the lead singer from Phish warbling into an Electrolux, not getting any louder but not going away—

By the time Dean skidded across the landing, goggling down into the pit of the living room, it was like the fox said: chaos reigned.

So much chaos, in fact, that it was hard to tell what was going on.

One thing, though, was immediately apparent: each and every party guest was currently stampeding toward an exit. The two dance floors (living room and kitchen) were emptying out rapidly through both front and back doors, albeit not in the orderly fashion generally requested by fire marshalls. It kind of looked like CGI, he thought, impressed despite himself, like rampageous armies of orcs swarming the two towers. He couldn’t see Cas anywhere.

Someone knocked into the stereo system, and Lady (apparently) Gaga shrieked to a halt as one of Kevin’s speakers toppled over, dragging cords along with it. A girl in fishnets sprinted in the opposite direction, scattering CDs behind her like flower petals.

At the same time, an extremely drunk or maybe just clumsy guy crashed into the coat rack by the door and floundered briefly, shouting garbled words into a pile of coats, before being yanked back upright by his—presumably—friends, who then dragged him out with them, leaving a strewn heap of scarves and jackets over which several more people tripped in their flight.

Dean watched someone walk right on top of his leather jacket, but there was no way he could get across the room to rescue it. Knocked-over red plastic cups and sticky puddles dotted Box of Rain’s hardwood floors. He cringed, thinking of the three kegs in the backyard—no telling how many people at this thing were underage.

As if on cue, a couple of police cruisers pulled up at the front of the house, lights flashing blue and red through the big bay window. Slowly and with difficulty, after the way of their people, the squaddies began to start to commence getting out, huffing and straightening gear belts and holsters and fiddling with creaky walkie-talkies, moving ponderously upstream through the panicked departing, neither group taking much notice of the other.

Where were Sam and Jess? Why had everyone started scattering like bugs? Most of all, why weren’t he and Cas still in bed? Dean felt genuine despair.

“Cas!” he shouted out into the rapidly emptying space, waving away dry-ice fog with both hands. “The cops just got here! Where the hell are you, man? The _fuck_ is that _noise_?”

This being Dean’s life, just as he stepped off the landing all the lights went out.

By the strobing lightbars on the cruisers, through a haze of dry ice, Dean saw several things all happening at once, disjointedly—

Charlie crouched by the woodstove, its door open, her face flickering with different colors in the firelight, mouth moving as she threw in a handful of small objects, one after another—

Kevin, also in the kitchen, looking over his shoulders and cursing a blue streak while pouring something down the sink drain, turning on both taps all the way—

And, finally, over by the sofas they’d shoved against the rear wall of the house to make the dance floor—Cas, slipping off both shoes and speaking in a low voice, moving cautiously as if not to frighten—who? what?

“There’s no one left, Cas, the house is empty,” Dean said, puzzled, and headed toward him, stepping over beer puddles, batting away wisps of fog, and coughing.

“Dean, stop,” Cas warned him, and pointed toward the shadows. Dean couldn’t see anything. “It’s her, it’s the mother and baby.”

For an insane instant Dean thought he meant, like, _round yon virgin mother and child_.

Cas made his most exasperated sound. “The _squirrels_ , Dean. From the cedar tree.” Like Dean should have known that? Why were there squirrels inside?

Cas placed his shoes quietly on the floor and continued slide-stepping toward something only he could see, making clucking soothing sounds.

Dean felt really, really, confused. “So, there are cops,” he began again.

Suddenly a blur exploded from behind the sofas, a rampaging gray lunge, and the Christmas—solstice—tree wobbled violently back and forth, ornaments rocketing in all directions and shattering on the floor as a double helix of squirrel circled its branches, racing upward.

In addition to the vacuum-cleaner drone—which, Dean realized, was coming from the kitchen, and in fact was coming from _Charlie_ —now there was a defiant chittering racket from the tree. 

Pine needles flew from the tree, hitting him in the face; he and Cas both put up their hands, advancing warily. Mr. Spock Funko Pop toppled to the floor and bounced several times, eventually rolling into the kitchen, where for some reason, Charlie snatched him up and also threw _him_ into the fire, continuing her weird monotonous humming.

What the actual—

“ _Dean!_ Please, I need you to—can you open that window,” hissed Cas urgently. “No, the other one, the one without a screen— _yes_. I’m going to tell them they can leave through it.”

 _For the love of god he’s talking to squirrels_ , Dean thought, with some consternation.

“Cops?” he tried once more, feebly, and then gave up as Cas sidled closer to the tree, gesturing oddly with his palms and speaking what sounded to Dean like Old English.

Dean decided to let him handle the rodent situation and turned back to the front door, expecting an unamused police presence.

Instead, Sam and Jess were out on the porch, silhouetted against the window, each speaking to a pair of officers and obviously doing an outstanding job. One of the cops talking to Sam threw back her head, laughing, and placed a hand on his arm. _Right,_ he thought, smirking. _Separate entrance_. Those two.

Who better to handle police than the smooth-talking law-school students?

He turned back to Cas just in time to see him cranking the sunroom window closed triumphantly, a fluffy squirrel tail disappearing into the night.

“Dude, how,” he started, but he had no idea how to finish that, and no time either, before Cas shoved past him into the kitchen, obviously headed for Kevin, only to have Charlie snatch at his pants leg, nearly taking him down.

“It’s done, Cas, it’s done,” she kept saying, as Cas looked wildly from her to Kevin and back again, everyone’s faces panicked in the firelight.

Kevin shut both taps tightly, nodding, wiping his hands on his shirt. “I’m sorry, we weren’t expecting—“

“No, that’s fine, it’s okay,” Cas breathed, half-stroking Charlie’s hair—she was still clutching his pants leg—and then starting to laugh, a little hysterically.

Dean felt even more confused now, and actually slightly pissed off at being completely excluded. Drugs? Really?

His face obviously reflected his growing irritation and sense of having been wronged, because when Cas finally managed to pry off Charlie and turn back around, running his hands through his hair, relieved, he saw Dean and froze before moving toward him, apprehension in his eyes.

“Ye gods, babe, shit, I’m _so_ sorry, there wasn’t time to explain, we only just barely—”

His socked feet slipped on the hardwood and automatically Dean reached out to steady him just before Cas crashed into him, which turned into intertwined fingers and hands and Cas still sort of somehow slamming against Dean, which turned into his back colliding with the door jamb, Cas leaning on his chest out of breath, their faces too close together, which logically and inevitably (Cas’s eyes dark in the firelight, his lips still slightly swollen) turned into, well, kissing; which turned into a single stricken girlish gasp and then shocked silence, both emanating from the living room, Jess and Sam having apparently come back inside at some point during all this; which turned into Dean and Cas drawing slightly apart, the former rattled, the latter clearly trying not to be visibly pleased if not smug—

—all of which happened in about eight seconds, just as Sam, outraged, pawed at the dimmer switch on the wall trying to turn the lights back on, saying with disgust, “You have _got_ to be kidding me—” which, yes, made Dean’s blood run cold,—and, simultaneously, everything happening in slow motion, as it does at such moments, Kevin catapulted himself balletically from behind the kitchen island toward Sam, shouting, “ _Sam_ — _no_ — _don’t_ —”

And the lights came on, and Cas’s eyes grew very big, and behind him, reflected in them, Dean watched the Christmas— _solstice_ —tree burst into bright blue flame.

•

Later, when teasing Cas about the Infamous Solstice House Party Fire, Dean liked to accompany his hilarious reenactment (in which he played all the parts, of course) with mouth-kazoo—if not “The Final Countdown,” or the Looney Tunes version of the Mexican Hat Dance song (which he’d learned in Spanish class was actually called "[El Jarabe Tapatío](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtDNYqGNK3A)"), then a ditty Dean knew only as “clown-car music,” his recital of which went something like this:

DOOT doot _toodle_ -oodle, DOOT doot _too_ -doo!

—which practically _guaranteed_ Cas would not only complain and throw things but usually start biting and/or tickling him, and how was he supposed to pass up such an opportunity?

(He tried, he really did, to restrict this performance to once a year, on their solstice anniversary; but this required superhuman strength on his part, because he secretly loved being tickled. Especially by Cas, with his long clever fingers. And how easy it was to tickle him back, into contortions and shameless begging.)

At this time, however, nothing was funny about any of it. There was nothing but gasping and flailing, choking on smoke and tripping over each other, everyone yelling directions that no one else listened to—Sam trying to haul the tree toward the front door by its metal stand and dropping it because it was too hot, scattering blazing-blue pinecones that Dean then chased, stamping on them and swearing; Jess trying to beat out flames with the felt tree skirt, green and gold glitter from the glued-on pentacles showering everyone, shouting at Sam not to let his fucking hair catch on fire (she had a point: it swung dangerously close to the flames, that _hair_ , Dean swore he’d cut it in Sam’s sleep tonight); Kevin hopping around with a fire extinguisher which he’d somehow been holding the entire time, hollering at everyone to get out of the way so he could actually use it, because he was a _chemistry_ major goddammit and _he_ knew what he was _doing_ ; Cas darting around the house opening all the doors and windows while also trying at the same time to shove on his cowboy boots, one in each hand, having to put them down to open things; and Charlie, clapping a hand to her mouth in horror, shrieking “ _Mycroft!_ ” and then running upstairs to her room and back, clutching an enormous glass bowl, with water slopping over the rim and down her chest, until unthinkingly, Dean just grabbed it from her and threw the contents over the tree.

And, as it turned out, partly over Kevin, who’d just finally gotten close enough to use the fire extinguisher. Which he had done. Very thoroughly.

This part, Dean usually left out of the reenactment. Because both time, and his heartbeat, seemed to stop. Everyone stood paralyzed over the foaming, sizzling tree ruins, and Charlie’s eyes blurred with tears as she looked up at him, and he realized what he’d done.

At which point, the fire alarm went off.

Suddenly, without any difficulty, everyone swung into coordinated action and Box of Rain became an unhesitating, well-oiled team. Cas cast aside his remaining boot, Kevin dropped the fire extinguisher, Sam and Jess quit fighting and they all worked together in a desperate concerted effort to find Mycroft and return him to his bowl—and, well, it all ended fine.

But there was a long dark moment during which Dean knew how much Charlie already meant to him, and what a dick he _always_ was, and how he always ruined _everything_ —and he couldn’t stand that. Not this time, not with these people.

Which meant that Dean had been frantic, and therefore the one to locate Mycroft after what felt like forever, sloshing around inside half a glass ornament, alive and unharmed.

Nevertheless, his hands had a distinct tremor when he refilled the fishbowl in the kitchen and lowered the little fish slowly back in. Charlie, crowded against the sink’s edge, clutched Dean’s arm so hard she left fingerprints, trying not to sob outright, until at last Mycroft casually unfurled his long spotted exotic red tail and began to drift around, nonchalantly nibbling at invisible flakes of food as if he’d just been out running errands.

At which point they both started breathing again, and threw their arms around each other (Dean placing the aquarium bowl safely in the sink first).

“You hopeless fucking _bonehead,_ ” Charlie said into his armpit, hiccuping, and Dean laughed shakily and pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

“I know,” he said, closing his eyes and giving thanks to God, Jesus, the Avengers, the crew of the NCC-1701, and Cas’s entire pagan pantheon for all his undeserved blessings, including sex with a hot linguist, but most of all that he hadn’t murdered Mycroft. “I know.”

(In the end, Mycroft had an extravagantly long and happy guppy life—and, as it turned out, many babies. But that’s another story.)

While they’d revived Charlie’s pet, the rest of the household had hauled the sodden tree to the curb, and then collapsed on the porch in different stages of wetness, sootiness, and wheezing fatigue, as Dean gathered up and extinguished the last of the pinecones.

Eventually Kevin went inside and came back out with a six-pack of Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale and a church key, and solemnly opened and passed around the bottles. Charlie pulled a pink plastic barrette out of her hair and handed it to him, and Kevin clipped back his sopping-wet bangs. Jess was still shivering; Sam wrapped her in Dean’s coat, which he’d grabbed up off the floor, and they kind of toppled over onto the couch together.

No one spoke for several minutes.

Cas lay half-sprawled on the steps, and after Dean tossed the last smoldering pinecone into a galvanized metal trash can, without even thinking he threw himself down right next to Cas, scooted over way inside his personal space…and then became conscious of a resonant, eloquent silence.

He inhaled, settled his shoulders, turned around to face Sam. Better just get it over with—

Dean half-expected Sam to punch him, but instead he’d merely stood up from the couch with a fist cocked on either hip like someone’s _mom_ , with the most petulant, tight-lipped, _outraged_ expression on his face that Dean had seen in years. Maybe not since that time when, in their teens, he’d replaced the television’s remote control with a decoy and then stood way back in the hallway, randomly changing channels and smothering his laughter until Sam finally figured out that it was his brother who was demonic, not the TV set.

“ _What_ ,” Sam said thinly.

“Nothing,” Dean spluttered, “I just, your _face_ —”

“Well, I’m glad you think _my face_ is funny, when it’s so, what’s your favorite word—it’s so _awesome_ that I have to find out about this by _accident_. Were you _going_ to say anything?” 

“Wait,” Dean said, scrambling to his feet and peering at Sam. “ _That’s_ why you’re mad?”

“Of _course_ that’s why I’m mad,” huffed Sam, “why _else_ would I be mad—I just thought we were _closer_ than that. I mean this has obviously been going on for a while, like maybe since you got here, and it wasn’t Cas’s place to say anything about it—plus you’ve been seeing guys for years, but were you _ever_ going to _tell_ me?”

He dragged a hand through his hair, fuming. “I told myself over and over again that you’d talk to me about it when you were ready, but now I feel like you obviously don’t trust me if it’s Cas and you still can’t even—Dean, what the _fuck,_ put me _down_ you asshole—”

“Nuh-uh. _You’re_ my present this year,” Dean said, stifling his relief into Sam’s ribcage as Sam aimed kicks at Dean’s shins. He ignored this and swung him in a vengeful yet joyous circle, narrowly missing both their beer bottles.

(But not missing the way Cas looked up at them through his lashes, or how his eyes met Dean’s and he smiled a slow tender smile which also said, in a disarming way, _see: I told you so_. A no-holds-barred _adoring_ smile, one Dean hadn’t really seen before.)

Breathless, he put Sam down. “So you knew. The whole time you knew.”

“Jesus _Christ_ , Dean, of course I knew.” Sam shoved him away, grabbed his beer, and flopped back next to Jess. He kissed her forehead, said something Dean couldn’t hear that made her laugh, and took another swig before scowling at Dean again. “Like you couldn’t nose it out of _me_ within an hour after school if _I_ had a crush on someone. Most of the time it didn’t take you that long, you knew before I had the damn _car_ door all the way open.”

 _He remembers me picking him up after school_. Dean sat back down next to Cas, who leaned across him in a very obvious overt way to steal Dean’s beer, having finished his own.

 _Hang on_ , Dean thought. _That means_ —

“So the first time I ever—you’re saying, you knew about—”

“Dude, we should talk about this later? When, like, Charlie and Jess aren’t sitting here all hearteyes and _chinhands_? But yeah: I knew about Benny, okay. How could I not, you idiot.”

Behind him, Dean could feel Cas’s eyebrow flying up into his messy hairline. _Yeah_ , he thought at him, _I’m going to have to explain that one to you_. For now he just put a hand on Cas’s knee and took a few more breaths, trying to let it go. But he had to be sure.

“So it really doesn’t bother you? That I’m, that Cas and I are—?”

At this Kevin guffawed, and Dean turned to glare at him. “Something you wanna share, Spengler?”

Kevin coughed and looked over at Sam, trying not to laugh. “No, I guess not.”

Sam had his head in both hands, shaking it back and forth and making muffled noises. Jess sighed gustily, putting her arm around Sam’s shoulders. “Kevin’s _laughing_ , okay, because that’s how they actually _met_ , in Sam’s sophomore year. Sam was making out with Kevin and some guy named Nick at their residence hall party, and they were freaking out all the frat guys, so Cas, who was playing in this _jazz_ combo, had to wade in and drag them to safety.”

There was a lot in this speech to digest. Dean wasn’t sure he managed it entirely.

“Oh,” he said, at last. Then, plaintive: “Why did I go to college in the Midwest?”

Charlie snorted and came over with a pack of [Black Devil Pink Rose](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/67272588158669434/), offering one to Cas. Dean scowled at him, hoping he looked forbidding, but Cas accepted one anyway. “Don’t make faces at me, bodyworker,” he said around the cigarette, cupping his hands to light it, the flame shivering across his features; and Dean didn’t, couldn’t, because anything Cas did was beautiful.

On the porch swing, Kevin and Charlie both lit up, talking about compiling pythons again. It seemed to be their favorite snake or something. Cas held the cigarette out over the edge of the steps in his right hand and slid his left arm around Dean’s back, turning his face to blow rose-scented smoke out over the yard, so it wouldn’t waft back at Dean.

Dean wanted to pretend this whole thing didn’t give him feelings, but he really couldn’t.

Plus, it had happened _here_ —he was finally in a place where no one fucking cared. It was a non-starter. It was an un-event. It was not nearly as important to any of them as it was that he not use up all the hot water, desiccate people’s guppies, or keep secrets from them.

He leaned into Cas’s side, grateful for contact, and they were all quiet a while, listening to a car alarm one street over run through its noisy-mockingbird repertoire.

Speaking of noise. Dean cleared his throat slightly.

“So I get that you guys have some kind of chivalric code of co-operative silence here, like your sacred vow to quinoa or whatever. But, you know. Just wondering. Several things, actually. Like, that noise? Or, no—let’s start with the squirrels. How were there squirrels?”

Cas stubbed out his cigarette against the side of the porch and threw the butt toward the Christmas—solstice—tree, missing it by about fifteen feet. “I told you, they live in the cedar.” 

He flicked his eyes toward a tall, skinny ornamental evergreen at the side of the house, which reached up above the roof and had a flowered bedsheet dangling from its upper boughs.

Dean noticed several surprisingly large branches broken on the ground.

“Garth tried to fly,” Kevin explained. “I think his friends brought shrooms.”

“So when Garth, uh, when he flew, it—”

“Scared the squirrels,” Cas confirmed, “who ran in through the open door, and then got confused.”

The squirrels, Dean thought, had his complete sympathy.

“And squirrels don’t speak English?”

“I’m not exactly certain,” Cas said, a trifle huffy, hand going up automatically to straighten the knot of his tie. Dean petted his knee covertly, which earned him a look.

“Chaucer mentions _squirelles_ in _Parliament of Fowls,_  which is a dream poem about birds’ languages? So I thought maybe they might understand Middle English?”

He frowned at Dean, still worried about it, uncertain, and Dean kissed him so he wouldn’t laugh. “Whatever you said, Cas, it worked—they got the picture. Or maybe they just smelled the fresh air and went for it.”

He pointed next at Kevin, merciless. “And you—what were _you_ rinsing down the sink, wigging out like coked-up Henry Hill in _Goodfellas_ with the Feds coming after you? You had that fire extinguisher _right_ there, like you knew you’d need it. And why didn’t you want Sam to hit the lights?”

Kevin narrowed his eyes and took a long drag off his pink cigarette, which, along with the adorable barrette, somewhat reduced the effect of his super-villain impression. “Nothing illegal. Just kind of…toxic. Not very!” he added hastily. “Just a little toxic. To, to humans.”

“A little toxic,” Dean repeated, frowning.

“That’s why the fire was blue,” Charlie supplied helpfully. She drained her beer and went inside as though she had actually explained something. 

Dean was starting to get used to Box of Rain, though. He waited, tracing the guitar calluses on Cas’s fingertips. In a moment, Charlie came back with her Chromebook. She sat down on Dean’s other side and opened some tabs.

“Look, blue fire is sacred in Feri, okay? So we wanted…we wanted our solstice tree to go that extra mile for us.” As if unveiling something thrilling, she showed Dean a page with several structural chemical formulas on it and spread her hands proudly, like he would know what those meant and be impressed.

Just seeing the 2-D models, their lines and bonds, made his eyes hurt. Charlie looked at him, incredulous. “You didn’t take chemistry?”

“Sure I did, in _high school_ , Willow Rosenberg,” he retorted. “For my major, I did physics.” 

He’d actually had a lot of fun dragging wooden blocks up and down the carpeted hallway to calculate friction, and dropping lead weights into water to measure mass and volume—more fun than he’d known was possible in a science class. He wasn’t about to tell Her Ladyship Nerdcakes that he’d gotten an A in lab but Ds on all the tests, which somehow merged into an acceptable C+ by semester’s end. Car engines, weight machines, muscles, joints, bodies, people: these he could handle, instinctively self-assured. Anything symbolic bewildered him.

She sighed. “So these are different chlorides: calcium, copper, potassium. That last one, we could buy at the grocery store—it’s just a salt substitute, for people with hypertension—but Kevin had to get the rest from the lab, and then we got curious about some of the others, copper acetoarsenite and copper arcenite—we could have just used plain copper oxide, I guess, but we wanted to see which ones would—and then we just sort of, we decided to—”

“You soaked the tree in chemicals,” said Jess in disbelief. “You major loons.”

“Not the whole tree!” said Kevin defensively, kicking his feet up onto the back of the porch swing and hanging his head off the seat upside-down. “Just, just a lot of it. And, sure, all of the pinecones. After the party, we thought we’d have a bonfire in the backyard, like a big traditional Yule-log thing, and we wanted the fire to be, you know.”

“Blue,” agreed Dean.

He looked again at the laptop, at Charlie’s structural formulae. “You were trying to figure out which colors they’d each produce?”

Charlie nodded, flicking through the different images. “Potassium chloride’s supposed to be violet, calcium chloride blue, copper chloride…really blue. Which it was. As we, well. As we successfully demonstrated. Although personally I preferred the copper acetoarsenite mixed with potassium perchlorate.”

“I thought of that one,” said Kevin, sounding pleased. “Used in Japanese fireworks. Very traditional.”

Dean didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. They got their blue fire, alright. With bonus points for maximum drama and near-death pet experiences.

He gave Kevin an air high-five. “Nice going, Dr. Horrible, with the, uh, wonderflonium. Too bad it nearly burned down your _frigging house_. But you seemed sort of prepared for that?”

Kevin shrugged, an effortful movement from upside-down. “Cas asked me to switch off all the lights, thought it might calm down the squirrels. But while Charlie and I were ditching the leftovers, I realized the ethanol had probably dried in the meantime and a sudden flare of heat from the fairy lights might—yeah. And it did. We chemists learn to be prepared.”

Sam groaned, his face in his hands. “You soaked a resinous tree in _grain alcohol_. This is the best. Jess, now you see why my room has a separate entrance.”

“Hey, I’m kind of drunk over here,” Kevin offered mildly. “Also, before I forget, Charlie burned your weed in the stove while you were talking to the cops, along with Cas’s and my stuff. So we saved you from an infraction citation and you’re welcome.”

As Sam fake-throttled his housemate, Dean ran his hands through his own hair, then looked down at Cas, who was all but lying diagonally across the steps, eyelids drooping at half-mast, a position which looked uncomfortable but clearly wasn’t. Dean still felt disgruntled about being excluded from all these developments until after the fact, and tried not to think about how if Sam hadn’t seen them kissing he wouldn’t have turned on the lights.

But he also felt increasingly tolerant of the experimental denizens of Box of Rain, and most of all he wanted to take this sleepy flexible dark-haired guy back upstairs and (he shivered) fuck the living daylights out of him. If Cas would let him do that. Of course Cas would.

At this point it seemed Cas felt comfortable with letting anyone do anything, even ignite highly inflammable things in his tinderbox of a midcentury wooden cottage. “Dude, how have your tenants not destroyed the place by now?”

Cas didn’t open his eyes. “ _Housemates_. Honestly, we usually save ceremonial magic for our farm. But it seemed like just this once it wouldn’t hurt anything—en bien, moi je ne suis pas en colère. Besides: the living-room floor needs refinishing, you said we should replace the windows, Charlie never liked the Spock doll, und so weiter. All’s well that ends well yet, / Though time seem so adverse and means unfit. Ça m’est égal.”

Even after only knowing Cas a few days, Dean knew was getting tired when he switched to Indo-European word salad and rhyming couplets.

So Dean counted to ten, until he could keep his voice very even. “A farm. You also have a farm.”

“Well, it’s not _mine_.” Cas yawned. “It’s Carver’s, up in Sonoma. We usually go out there for quarters, sometimes cross-quarters; but at least quarters, if we can’t mark the whole wheel of the year. And sometimes full moon over summer, not during the semester of course. Carver, my Feri teacher—I told you about Carver." He curled on his side, tightening his arm around Dean and snuggling up to him like a small—Dean wasn’t going to finish that thought.

“We?” said Dean, feeling really slow. “You mean you and Charlie, right? Or, I guess Kevin too. Wait— _all_ of you?”

By this point Jess and Charlie were legitimately cry-laughing. Cas smiled, still not opening his eyes. “Yeah, _all_ of them. I corrupted them. Or found them, and gave them a safe place in which to be corrupt. I offer sanctuary to witches. It’s like herding cats, most days.”

“Sam,” Dean said rather than asked, his voice flat.

Sam raised his hand without stirring from Jess’s lap. “As charged.”

“And _you’re_ pissed off at _me_ for not telling you shit. You’re such a _lawyer_ , you know that? You closeted sack of weasels.” Sam’s only response was a brief complacent grunt.

Dean stared at his hands, addressing no one in particular. “Sam didn’t just move in here so he could dry his organic t-shirts on a clothesline and make yogurt, did he. It’s a…you’re a…”

“Coven,” finished Charlie. “And before you ask: I wasn’t working magic, I was just practicing my Tuvan throat-singing. It never hurts to practice! Well, actually it hurts a lot to practice, which is why I have to do it. Makes your throat really sore if you don’t keep it up. Oh, and I threw the Spock doll in the fire just because I was burning extra pinecones and I never really liked that little fucker.”

Sam sat up, aggrieved. “How can you say that? You _burned_ him?”

“He was evil Spock, from the parallel evil universe, with the goatee of evil!”

“He wasn’t _that_ bad, Charlie. After the real Kirk left, he was going to try to turn that shit around, you could tell.”

Behind him, the four nerdiest witches in Santa Clara County began arguing sleepily about “Mirror, Mirror.” Under cover of their bickering, Dean leaned down so that his lips brushed Cas’s ear. He shivered, which made Dean feel like he’d just won the lottery. “Why don’t we,” he murmured, barely teasing Cas’s earlobe with the tip of his tongue, “go look at the stars?”

“Aren’t any, it’s just clouds,” said Cas, his eyes flying open, yielding readily as Dean pulled him to his feet and steered him out into the front yard, arms around him, not letting go.

•

Underneath the streetlamp, looking up at melting snowflakes, Dean felt stupidly contented.

He was actually holding Castiel Milton, ABD, in his arms, swaying back and forth slightly on the sidewalk. Soon, he’d be back in Cas’s bed, accompanied by its witchy owner. And his brother (Dean still couldn’t really wrap his head around this one) was apparently also a witch. (How had this happened? They needed to talk. About a lot of things. Cas was right—about Dad, too. About all of it.)

Every one of those damn hippies with whom he’d just shared a six-pack: they were all terrible depraved wicked witches of the California West, who blasphemed and smoked pot and set fire to Christmas trees. Which, that last part—fair enough, considering all the other burning that had gone on over the centuries.

They also threw incredible fucking parties.

Dean’s hands were cold, but he didn’t want to take his arms from around Cas. And somehow his new boyfriend (boyfriend?! okay, yeah: _boyfriend_ ) seemed to know this.

Casually, without making any kind of deal about it, Cas interlaced their fingers and tucked Dean’s hands up under his armpits with his own like they were part of him, like his own hands. Despite the chill, Cas’s shirt was slightly damp under there, and Dean perversely wanted to smell and taste, started wanting to pull off Cas’s clothes again to get to his skin. Thinking about Cas’s apparently chronic lack of underpants made him woozy, and he clutched at his narrow waist for support, wanting to spin him around and start necking.

“Attunement,” he said, instead, voice rough, speaking directly into that sweet spot behind Cas’s ear, already one of his favorite bits of topography.

Cas exhaled, resting his one socked foot up on top of Dean’s so it wasn’t directly on the pavement. “Yes, and it rarely happens so quickly—usually you see family members with it, or people who’ve lived together for years. Me and—some of my siblings. You and Sam.” Dean thought about how he and Sam always wound up in lock-step whenever they walked, without even noticing, even though his kid brother now had a good four inches on him.

“Cas,” he whispered again, right behind his ear, “what _did_ you put into the gløgg?”

Cas stiffened in his arms. “Don’t be mad at me, okay?”

Dean couldn’t believe this—except by now, he actually could. Secret herbs and spices. Fucking witches. “It seems kinda late for that, babe. Just tell me—I’m not gonna be mad, I promise.”

“Okay,” Cas said, after a second. “It wasn’t really gløgg. It was…it was glühwein.”

Dean felt hysteria bubbling up in his chest, pushed it back down. “Cas…you realize, I don’t know what that even means.”

“We were out of almonds, so I couldn’t make gløgg,” he said, looking down at the sidewalk, all but cringing. “But I’d told everyone that’s what it was going to be—and then it wasn’t, and I didn’t know how to explain—see, real gløgg, Danish gløgg, you basically have to eat it with a spoon. This was regular mulled German glühwein. I’m so sorry,” he ended in a sad whisper.

“So that powder I saw you put in it?” Dean pressed.

“It was…it was  _Vanillezucker_ ,” Cas admitted, unhappily.

Dean figured whatever that was, it had to be pretty much what it sounded like, and it didn’t sound like something that would make him fall in love unless he was already going to. (Fall in love? _Fall in love_. Fuck. Fucking fuck. He was so fucked.)

Feeling Cas’s ass press subtly against his crotch, the strong long muscles of his back, it occurred to Dean that the next few months weren’t going to be easy. At all.

But winter vacation still had nearly two weeks left (he was already trying to figure out how he could go back a few days later than he’d planned). And there’d be spring break. And email, and texting. Cas was probably diligent and adroit with both, as long as Dean could make him write in English. Would they call each other? Maybe—his legs went out from under him a little bit—maybe Cas would want to have phone sex with him.

Mindreading as usual (would Dean _ever_ get used to that), Cas twisted his head to look back up over his shoulder at him, eyes glittering. “Have you ever had Skype sex?”

With Dean still confounded by that, Cas started to sing; and everything stood still.

He’d heard Cas sing the last two nights, but the sound of his voice still startled him. It had been much more high-pitched than Dean had thought it would be, from hearing him talk: a husky sweet dark tenor that always sounded like he’d had at least three beers, a little bit soft, a little bit flat—an acoustic voice, made to wrap around guitar strings.

But it wasn’t his voice—it was his choice of a capella songs that had Dean riveted in place.

Cas was singing a carol.

Well, sort of. If carols came in mid-nineties R&B flavor and were written by Mariah Carey.

_I don’t want a lot for solstice  
_ _there is just one thing I need  
_ _I don’t care about the presents  
_ _underneath the…burning tree_ (here Dean’s chest shook, as he tried to laugh silently)

Maybe they'd been practicing behind Dean’s back, because apparently all of Box of Rain knew the rest. One by one they chimed in from the porch, arriving together at the last line:

_I just want you for my own_  
 _more than you could ever know_  
_make my wish come true  
_ _all I want for solstice is you_

He heard snickering and giggles, the screen door slamming as Kevin danced out onto the porch with a mop in one hand, using it as a microphone while he started on the first verse and Charlie and Jess kicked in the backup singer parts (“aa-aaaaaaa; aa-AAAAAAA!”). Sam drummed on the sofa arm, keeping time. He hadn’t yet discovered his new head ornament.

Dean could feel Cas’s warm mouth curving in a smile against his, since Dean had effectively paused his solo, which he probably shouldn’t have done except he couldn’t help it; and this, he thought, really _was_ all he wanted for solstice.

And all he wanted for tonight. And all he wanted for tomorrow. And, he suspected, all he would want—besides maybe world peace, infinite wishes, and a pony—for a really long time to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that was about 80 percent crack, 35 percent fluff, and at least 9.999999 percent total insanity, for your post-solstice reading pleasure. Sadly smutless, because I sort of, ah [ _don't say shot your wad, don't say shot your wad_ ]...used all that up, in Chapter 1. But! Will there be more installments in the saga of the nerdiest neo-pagan housemates in all of Santa Clara County? I fear we may rely on't.
> 
> Same as last time, the unbelievably generous [bettydays](http://bettydays.tumblr.com) betaed the part I got to her before midnight—namely, the first third; so the ensuite screw-ups are all mine, and will probably make her clutch her brow despairingly; but that doesn't stop her from being the bestest beta in town.
> 
> In conclusion, thank you for waiting for me to finish this! You're all so sweet, and I love you terribly. Find me on [tumblr](bert-and-ernie-are-gay.tumblr.com)! We'll have coffee, we'll talk.


End file.
